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Comment by celticmusic | Hacker News Reader

It was more about certain communities highly valuing "prettiness", such as RoR.

At the time of Ruby (driven by Rails) starting to draw people away from PHP I think there was much more value attached to a single "right way to do it" than just Ruby being prettier. In the current world with Laravel and other frameworks in the PHP world its less of a thing, but at the time every PHP application I worked on came with its own half-baked framework coupled together from various libraries, and missing some feature or another. Moving to Rails where you could jump into any application and at the very least understand the fundamentals of where particular bits of code belonged from the offset was a breath of fresh air.

Hell, I maintain an application where the person who originally programmed it reimplented Rails in PHP (except worse)... It gives me all kinds of grief lol

To be fair, there is something to be said about the aesthetics of a language, and Ruby is (at least to me) a far more readable and "pretty" language than PHP. There are a lot of small niceties that, once you are familiar with them, make Ruby genuinely enjoyable to read.

Yes, once you are familiar with. Otherwise, PHP with its generic curly-brace syntax is way easier to grok (I have to work on a codebase in Ruby and the funny syntax + no strongly typed compilation pass makes it really hard for me to get started modifying things).

> and Ruby is (at least to me) a far more readable

It’s funny folks pick on the “Magic” in PHP, yet overlook all of it in Ruby. I’m not a PHP guy anymore really (now Python/Rust/Java/Ruby mainly), but I’m still continually annoyed reading Ruby code. Here’s an example:

- find a method being called on a class, so want to find out details on said method

- grep through codebase, find no definition for said method

- grep through all gem dependencies, find no definition for said method

- search web, don’t find any obvious leads

- cry in despair

- finally find that method is handled by a method_missing on a dynamically generated class and never has anything related to the method name even as a string

- flip desk and go home for the day

Meta programming became far less common in Ruby, I barely see it in Rails apps anymore.

This. And I do agree with all the point parent mentioned about PHP, it is just now I am a lot older I am starting to question this higher value of "prettiness".

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