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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about that. Search Indeed.co.uk's API (which removes duplicates) for - "Ruby" title:(Rails or RoR) - and you'll find 101 jobs listed in London. Repeat the search for United Kingdom and there are only 158. So 64% of Rails jobs are in London. Compare that with PHP - 2102 jobs in the UK, 672 of them in London and you find a more even distribution and a much higher number of jobs. Rails is still a niche framework and has never come anywhere near matching PHP's adoption despite all the hype.

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I almost want to say thay this is an unfair comparison but that would also be unfair.

Nothing matches PHP adoption. It started 10 years before than Ruby and Python web frameworks and its runtime model is ideal for free hosting. That gave it mindshare and market share. It's still one of the ugliest languages even if it's slowly getting a face lift.

At the time its competitors where Java and Perl. Perl could have the same runtime model and was the first language for the web thanks to CGI.pm. PHP won because its simplicity and the commands embedded in the HTML page. Java is another world and only suited to corporate developers especially because there could be hardly a free Java hosting. Any of them now, not counting the AWS Lambda free tier?

How well paid are PHP jobs compared to Rails? I know the UK has abysmal salaries for developers (especially outside London) but the average salary for a PHP developer [1] is in a class of its own, much less than Ruby [2].

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary

[2] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Ruby_Software_Develo...

Yeah, but what percentage of those PHP jobs involve customizing a Wordpress site? I personally wouldn't touch any of those with a ten foot pole.

Besides, PHP codebases are notorious for being incredibly messy. PHP as a language used to suck big time, so you'd be taking over lots and lots of legacy code that would make you cry. That's nowhere as big of a problem with Rails: it's newer and Ruby is a joy to work with.

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