Ask HN: I'm a PHP developer, should I learn Rails or Django?

Why not learn both?

Pick a small(ish) project and go at it in both frameworks. You've said that you have friends who know both, and you've already got a handle on web dev through PHP, so maybe Rails one weekend, and Django the next. Now you know which one you like the best, rather than relying on other peoples' opinions.

I think I am going to take this approach. Thanks for the advice, all.

Maybe, you could tell us about it, when you finish.

Ideally, you would want something to work on and learn the language best suited to that, or pick a goal such as "Build iPhone Apps" for example.

If I had to give my opinion between Ruby or Python; I would say Python, as it is multi-disciplinary. Python can be used for everything from website to high performance computing and have great communities backing them up allowing you to be a more fluid and interesting engineer; Whereas Ruby (and its defacto framework, Rails) tends to be geared towards just web development. Just my 2 cents.

Don't discount Ruby as just being focused on Rails. I think the only thing which makes python more general than ruby is that python has a larger community than ruby does. There are GTK+ and Qt bindings for both languages. They are very similar languages and I prefer python to ruby solely based on the larger community around python.

Re: Rails vs Django; I prefer Django because of the magic box complaint you have with Rails. I don't really feel that with Django although, of course, YMMV.

Take this with a grain of salt because I feel I am biased towards PHP but here it goes.

Python while a nice language that I have tried, I absolutely hate the indentation, I hate to have to write code and care about its indentation, I prefer to write my code without caring about it and let my editor format it for me when I'm done or need to read it.

As for Ruby while I can't talk much about the language, the comunity itself kind of scares me, I have the idea that they are some sort of zealots who attack anyone that doesn't use Ruby. (sorry Ruby guys that's the feeling I have), the little I know about the language is that I don't like the syntax much but I am a C like syntax lover.

Now for PHP one of my loved languages (Java and C++ are others), I like the syntax, I like to have braces on my code makes it easy for me to read, but I guess on how much you are used to it, there are some nice libraries too, but some are heavy (Zend is one of them, does a lot but it's heavy), a lot of things that I do are done in PHP, while it may not be the fastest code running, it's one of the fastest to write.

Once again beware, this reflects my way of viewing the languages.

I think it's great that you want to learn something new. The main question that I would ask myself is, what adds the most value to my portfolio?

How much value does another similar backend language give?

My thoughts on this would be: Not to much. I would rather look for something that makes you a more interesting engineer. You could e.g. learn to make android apps. That would make you a quite valuable person being able to code mobile frontend and a backend service. Or a backend language/framework that is far different and let's you solve problems that you run into with PHP on high traffic websites. Some companies started using Scala for high performance parts of their service. Or get a good understanding of Apache Lucene a search engine.

But something that is more different from PHP and will make you a more interesting engineer.

Thanks for the input, and I value the suggestions as they are things that interest me (I'd love to get into Scala when I have the time).

I guess I should have been clearer, I am specifically looking into Rails/Django because what I do primarily is build web apps. I feel like I am reaching a plateau of productivity with PHP because of it's nature and my ruby/python toting peers are far ahead while only using this tech for 1-2 years max.

I am getting the feeling that Rails is going to be the best match for what I am looking for, mainly because of the huge library of gems.

Again, thanks for the input though.

I played with Rails a long time ago and decided to try Django when it hit the 1.0.

You have one really good argument for going with Django: your friends use it. You can ask them tips, talk about it, and they certainly help you in the right direction.

Aside from that, I recommend you to try the Django tutorial, shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

Also, the small webserver bundled with Django will restart automatically whenever you change a file.

My friends (co-workers, I don't really have many other technically minded friends) are pretty much equally split between Django and Rails. They collaborate between ruby and python camps. I shall give it a go! Thanks!

In my experience, rails has a better community and gems are plentiful. Python is great for certain things, especially larger infrastructures and applications that run outside of a web request cycle.

Rails, once learned, is so fucking fast at developing applications it should be illegal.

Right tool for the right job, for sure. Generally, rails works great for web apps and is releasing versions faster than companies can keep up with it.

I highly recommend rails. Django code base is a mess the last time I looked at it and rails has more industry cred and can get you out of client work and into product development easier. Just my experience anyway.

Like any language/platform, they both solve particular problems really well and then are OK or downright messy for the rest. I've developed applications for both platforms, and will more likely choose Django over Rails at the moment, but mostly because I work with Python a lot in general.

Ruby is a fun language and Rails is, essentially, its killer app. Programming Rails apps means learning a lot of conventions, a lot of "the right way" to do things. It's not just code style, but about good software engineering practices -- testing, database migrations, and multiple environments are all built in and easy to use. There are also some tremendous environment and deployment tools out there. RVM and bundler make dependencies easy to manage, and HAML greatly cleans up the HTML side of things. As mentioned elsewhere, Rails development can be really fast once you've got up to speed, but that can take time and cause serious headaches for anyone who walks into maintaining an existing reasonably complex project.

I love Python and use it all the time. It does have a bit of a problem with legacy libraries moving to Python 3, Django being one of them (if you want to try Django, use Python 2.7). Django was built for a newspaper website, as such it has some slightly odd conventions that can be confusing at first. Notably it makes the distinction between an app (reusable piece of functionality) and a site (comprising one or more apps). It has a strict template engine (by default), that has its own DSL which requires some getting used to. Django generates a lot less files than Rails by default, and generally feels more compact. It also has a really nice admin feature out of the box.

Take something you have coded in PHP and see how easy it is to re-factor in both languages.

There are no downsides to knowing all of these web frameworks, eventually you will find yourself in a position where company X only wants Ruby, or company Y only writes python.

Google: "foo sucks" & see what you can dig up about each language's quirks.

fyi: webrick (the dev rails server) only needs to be reset for database changes. Everything else will show up with a refresh.

Take a relatively non-complex but not too trivial project that you did in PHP. Do it in Rails and Django both. See how it feels and then you can possibly decide. I only work with Python but was not sure between Django and micro-framework such as Flask. I did a User Management/sign-up application using both and found Flask to be the right fit for me.