Why PHP is Still Better than Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Why PHP is Still Better than Ruby

bitcetera.com

25 pointscoglethorpe29 comments

I'm no PHP fan, but you Ruby people really are insufferably pretentious cocks.

I'm maybe not getting the HN philosophy, but this kind of useless posts should better be voted down than up in my opinion. You bring nothing new to the table except your useless hate about what the author has to say.

I'm no php fan either, neither a Ruby one. I'm not that involved into language wars to be honest. To my naïve eye, this article just sounds satiric and fun. It's not meant to be serious, and, no matter what is your definition of fun, i find it hard to take that personnally.

Also, if you really want to take this article seriously, there is quite a bit of consensus around the fact that PHP has MANY shortcomings that are not present in other dynamic languages. I won't argue in lengths about that, but if you replace "Ruby" by "Python" here, the article doesn't change a lot.

So if you're really offended by this - fun - post enough to register on HN just to post a troll about it (what is to be digged up in this guys seriously, the part about cocks ? duh ..), why don't you chill up, grab a beer, and forget about computers for a moment ?

The title of this post is pure, unadulterated linkbait. It is not surprising that people are responding with reflexive revulsion. This submission attracts an audience and then rudely spurns them.

Jokes about dead people can be funny. Inviting people to a relative's funeral and then bringing on a comedian to tease them about their formal clothes is... not funny.

Allright i stand corrected. As i'm not yet making a living out of programming, i kind of failed to see the troll in that. But that must be me :)

I think this type of thread needs flagged and removed altogether. It serves no intellectual purpose, I personally don't like reading stuff that's presented in this type of way.

*Edit: thanks for deleting this. I don't see anything wrong with pointing out the differences between ROR and PHP, but the trolling is getting old.

There are a-holes that use every language. Ruby actually had a reputation of being a really nice community until about 2007, and most of those people are still around (despite the influx of some less savory types).

Personally, I really wish developers didn't get stereotyped based on their programming language of choice, and communities weren't pigeonholed based on a few loud members.

you Ruby people

s/you Ruby/some/

Others of us try to be polite.

Just the insecure ones. If someone charismatic were to write and present "PHP: The Good Parts," it'd suddenly be in style among the tool polishers again.

I am comparing PHP Frameworks vs Ruby on Rails because that is a closer and more relevant comparison.

PHP frameworks such as Codeigniter are dead simple to use. They do not have the deployment, scaling, and performance headaches that Ruby On Rails has.

I don't get why people worship ROR, maybe because it is the original MVC framework.

Why hate on PHP when the popular and most successful website runs on it (facebook, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia, digg)?

The only mainstream ROR sites is Twitter which is still buggy even though it is 50x simpler than Facebook. I wouldn't put Basecamp into that category yet.

Funny you mention performance headaches that Ruby on Rails has. Someone actually benchmarked PHP frameworks against Ruby frameworks, and guess which were faster? Video is here: http://www.merbcamp.com/video/katz3.mp4 Slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/wycats/merb-camp-keynote-presentat...

> The only mainstream ROR sites is Twitter

Oh come on. Yellow Pages, Urban Dictionary, Hulu, 43 Things, ... http://rubyonrails.org/applications

"I don't get why people worship ROR, maybe because it is the original MVC framework."

Um, what? No. RoR is rather late to that game. You might be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller#Implement...

the problem with most PHP frameworks (symfony, cake, yes even code igniter) is that they are much slower than Rails (by at least 4x). They don't buy you anything unless you're not willing to learn anything beyond PHP. in terms of deployment, you don't have to use capistrano; if you want you can manually deploy rails like php

another problem with PHP compared to x language is that it's too web centric; it's just not flexible enough

imho You're better off either using Rails or Django, but thats me

When you talk about PHP being too "web centric [... and] just not flexible enough", how do you mean?

Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps? What other dimensions of flexibility do you have in mind?

"Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps?"

yes that and bots, and God knows what other back end programs; PHP is decent at the one thing it does (way better than Perl 5 - the thing it replaced), but why limit yourself to just being able to code only web apps? to me that's PHP's biggest weakness, but again that's just my opinion

to me what I still don't understand is why people aren't willing to learn and migrate to either ruby or python... they are very easy to use and understand (just as easy as PHP imo), while being very powerful and flexible at the same time; plus they're popular enough with large enough communities (though yes at times there are jerks in the ruby side - but they are very helpful when asking ruby questions)

Thanks for clarifying some more!

I've been using PHP almost exclusively when doing stuff for the web, but frequently feel that I want to pick up both Ruby and Python. I still haven't actually done it yet.

It isn't a lack of community or the presence of jerks that keeps me from getting there. A big part of it is that it seems to take a bit of a different infrastructure to get started. This may be somewhat driven by misunderstandings.

If I want to incorporate a great library that someone wrote in PHP, I drop the source in and start linking to it. File system operations; I know those. For others, say Ruby, it seems like I'd need to run an installer that grabs files and places them somewhere. Then I type out a text file and run another script that builds my database. I don't know how that clock works, so I don't feel comfortable basing my schedule on it yet.

It seems like an awesome way to do things, and I'm excited about getting into it, but I'm making time tradeoffs between (learning another language and how to manage apps) and (day-job and building project ideas that I love).

The key is going to be to shift (learning another language ... etc) onto the project stack.

just remember the older you get, the harder it will be to learn new tricks =) (from what I've seen it's very rare for a programmer to know more than 1 or even 2 languages)

everything new is hard and initially inconvenient until you get past the initial hump

forgot to mention if you don't want to deal with deployment and installation - heroku and google appengine are great ways to avoid that

Thanks for the tip! I'll spend some time reading on what those both provide; I think that once I'm writing code and watching it perform I'll have to motivation to pull myself over the other hurdles.

The fact is, both ROR and PHP are good in different scenarios. CodeIgniter allowed me to build HnDir.com in <8 hours, and I'm using ROR on my current project. But this constant bashing of the other language treating it like PC vs Mac is just absurd.

Never worry about scaling? That's silly.

It says "They do not have the deployment, scaling, and performance headaches that Ruby On Rails has". From my experience, it's true, even with Passenger (though much better than before).

Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr and Digg all use non-PHP solutions for the back end.

Rails can scale fine once you realize it's not magic; you take a hit from using a framework designed to make developers happy, not servers, but you can work around it — at the end of the day, Ruby isn't slow like people make it out to be.

It only reads like a natural language if you have already learned how to read ruby. To the rest of us, its still just just Heavenly Script. (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024)

Wasn't this killed a day or so ago?

I hope so.

Tell HN: "Ruby vs. PHP" is not of interest to good hackers. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554608

  it "should score 0 for gutter game" do
    20.times { @bowling.hit(0) }
    @bowling.score.should == 0
  end

Wow, Ruby/RSpec really sucks.

And by sucks I mean "reads like a natural language and rules".

Without taking sides, why is this being voted down?

Your opinion that this snippet reads like a natural language and is therefore useful is well taken.

I'm guessing it was downvoted because it was written in a snarky way.

Personally I don't understand the need for code that looks like natural language. This is probably because I grew up in the world of C/C++, and I find php to be the most relatable. When I look at Ruby I have to think about what the heck they are talking about.

Considering how popular Ruby is I have often thought of spending more time with it, but it is so slow I just can't get my head around bothering. PHP using opcode cachers(xcache) and a good webserver (lighttpd) will run very fast...

Jeremy

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