Because there are people out there writing articles like this. Lacking any kind of logic and mixing apples with oranges, the autor does a very poor job of showing the public why Ruby may be better then PHP. Let’s see my ideas about his rants
1) Human-readable code – this mostly depends on developers, as i said some time ago there are good programmers and bad/lazy programmers. So one can create readable PHP code and another can create a very unreadable Ruby code.
2) Principle of least surprise – “minimizes confusion for experienced users” – What about beginner users ? And what about learning how to write code and you won’t get surprised. Not in Ruby, not in PHP
3) Community maturity – As one commenter said the article itself is a proof of some Ruby developers immaturity. Also remember the Rails is a Ghetto rant by Zed Shaw ? If not, search on Google.
4) Rails – PHP has a lot more frameworks to choose from, some of them being very good.
5) Object Oriented Programming – if you wouldn’t live in a cave you would know that PHP has this for years
6) ActiveRecord design – Active record is not the holy grail of web development
7) Easier to install – this is funny. Usually one line of command and the module is installed. He must be really lazy.
8) MVC – this is really mixing apples with oranges. Ruby can’t do MVC out of the box, Rails can as most of the PHP frameworks can
9) JVM support – Quercus does ring a bell ?
10) Formal namespaces – Well, PHP 5.3 has namespaces
11) Pre-installed on most operating systems – WTF ? PHP is basically on any Linux machine out of the box. If PHP is not installed then who the hell is it ?
12) Interactive shell – there are debuggers in most IDE’s
13) Maintainability – this depends on application design
14) Everything is an object – there are also other paradigms, there are no absolute truths
I think the author wanted to write a post that would attract him lots of traffic, because such kind of controversial articles usually do attract traffic. But bashing one language over another to attract traffic is not something that is advisable to do. Not if you want in the future to earn a living from programming. Maybe Steve realized this already as his full name doesn’t appear beside the post and the domain name registration info is also privacy protected. This was the only wise thing from him. Because i don’t think any serious company would hire him as a programmer.
P.S.
In the end two advices:
1) One for my readers. Seeing the level of articles on webdeveloperjuice.com, i wouldn’t be reading any material from there.
2) For the author of the article. Learn to write code if you want to earn a living. Writing articles like this will get you some traffic, but not money as you might hope. The audience of such articles (web developers) usually developed advertising blindness by the time they learned to code. So you won’t get much money no matter the traffic.
Laszlo Bodor
