Comment by iqster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iqster | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have any startup cred but I do fun personal projects. Here's my take ...

I used to code web apps in Python. Started playing with PHP about a year ago and enjoyed it. I had a hard time figuring out the right framework to use. There's just a ton of choices ... each with some good ideas. Perhaps it was that or my own fault, but I would just hack out projects with straight PHP - no frameworks! This wasn't the fastest thing in the world but works well enough.

Two weeks ago, I did a hackathon where my partner did his piece in RubyOnRails and I did mine in straight PHP. Needless to say, I was shocked at our productivity difference. Since then, I've been learning RoR and have been blown away. Why am I okay learning the rails framework as opposed to frameworks in PHP (or for that matter, Python). I think it is because there is just one. It means a more focused community, and gives me more confidence in investing in learning and adapting to the framework.

So ... less choice is good in my opinion (and others - there's even a book about it ... "Paradox of Choice").

Choosing rails because there is only one well known framework for ruby seems awesomely flawed for me.

If rails doesn't work the way you want, or makes something unnecessarily difficult/complex, your options are a) bend to the will of rails or b) switch language and framework, which means any existing code is basically useless after switching over.

Choice is not a bad thing. If people are seriously using the lack of choices with ruby as a positive argument there is something truly wrong with the world.

You missed the whole point. He explained that productivity was the force that pushed him into Rails, and more focused community on only one framework (actually there are more frameworks like Sinatra for example) is advantage in bigger picture (more mature code, more ppl working on the project, more knowledge resources on the net, less diversification of job market etc).

Having a choice is not bad thing, but having too many choices can be.

The claimed productivity boost was between vanilla PHP and Rails, so it's already a poor comparison.

Add to that, the reason he was using vanilla PHP is because he couldn't choose a framework, and his whole argument seems pretty flimsy to me.

Vanilla PHP by itself is a framework (as template language for the web) with many API that vanilla Ruby is not providing. If you will compare both in this way it will be poor comparison too right ? My point is that you can't compare PHP with anything on the market in this dimensions.

PHP could be productive in the past, currently PHP frameworks are trying to fix fundamental flaws of language architecture and my subjective opinions is that they are constantly failing, language can't be fixed by building frameworks on top of it. This is IMHO the big win for Rails, Django, Node.js, they don't fix the language, they just don't need to, they extend it and provide productive framework to complete much different task, build end-user application right ?

No, PHP is not a framework, it's a language.

People say PHP is a templating language because it allows inline code. I think that's what he meant.

I used to do what you did too. Pure PHP without frameworks projects always grow unmaintainable. At least go with a framework like CodeIgniter. Rails is great too if you prefer Ruby (which I do).

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