craigmcnamara

It's pretty far from that now. It's a modern multi-paradigm language with a package manager, module system and enormous community. It's a pretty solid language for teaching in my opinion.

It's not Ruby if it doesn't run Rails.

Software is made by other people in other places too!

Nailed it!

I'd wonder why they're pressuring you to move to PHP. I've written PHP in the past, and recently started maintaining a site in PHP through a company acquisition. Normally I prefer Ruby on Rails and have used it since Rails v1.2.3. I consider PHP to be a step backwards technology and tooling wise. Laravel seems like the nicest copy of Rails, but it seems like everything nice in PHP is a crude copy of something from the Ruby/Rails ecosystems.

Frequently in PHP I found myself missing a proper REPL, yes PHP can be run interactively with `$ php -a`, but it doesn't print the last returned value, so spelunking in a running system is slow and awkward, luckily I've found Boris(https://github.com/borisrepl/boris) which is more like IRB or Pry, but it's still unpleasant when I'm trying to kill a tricky bug. On the package management front Composer is a better solution than previous PHP offerings, but it's got some quirks that make it seem unpolished compared to Bundler.

If I was given a choice PHP I would never willingly pick PHP. I suspect your company is pressuring you to move because they think they can get PHP devs at a lower cost than Ruby devs. If you're in the Bay Area there are plenty of companies that will hire you to write Ruby so you don't really have to switch if you're not comfortable with it.

Plenty of things do, until they don't. The, "well, we're stuck with it" philosophy is strong in the PHP community and I hate it.

Helix was just announced at Rails Conf 2016, so it's definitely not abandoned.

It's generally a bad idea to develop with a copy of your production DB. This is how emails accidentally get sent from staging servers to real people and how sensitive information finds itself in insecure places. I didn't see any part in the tests that deals with scrubbing sensitive data, so to me this is just enough feature to be really dangerous.

`git blame SuperImportantCodeFile2` => Fired

So the plus side is their next gen fighter is shit too?

I've always viewed full stack(integration test with JS execution) as the best way to start testing an app with no test, or to flesh out an idea without committing too much to an implementation. As the app develops, unit tests are added to verify bugs are fixed and controller tests for API actions that have requirements beyond CRUD.

JRuby has never been fast to boot, but after boot it's very fast to execute.

>> Management: "There's too much risk, even if I can't explain why."

This sums up one of my major frustrations of being a programmer for the Air Force Research Lab(AFRL).

You have branch and division managers that are completely incompetent trying to micromanage Software Engineers and Project Managers.'Why' isn't ever a thing they think about because they're afraid to admit as managers what they don't know why, and they aren't interested what would make software and integrations more effective. Within projects there was a great deal of expertise that was squandered by poor management and management structure within the Air Force.

I worked there for 5 and a half years, then quit because I couldn't deal with the frustration of upper level incompetence and blatant fraud waste and abuse.

I see you didn't like my zinger. I have a pistol permit, but I don't see any need to carry a gun. It's just not something I worry about.

Isn't a handgun just a gun made to make assaulting another human easier?

PHP isn't just bad tooling, it's a bad attitude, like your attitude. I've said that I dislike the PHP experience for many valid reason and you question my competence, experience and validity of my experiences with PHP. I looked in to XDebug and it's not the kind of tool I was looking for. It's heavy weight, requires changing the VM config and from the cached version of the website that is down at the moment appears to imply that it's best used within an IDE.

I'd like a REPL debugger that I can activate easily and use from my terminal without fucking with the VM too much. My real goal is to not have to make changes to this project beyond correcting damage inflicted by the PHP attitude of blissful incompetence and copy paste. While I do believe that you can write good code or bad code in any language, PHP does not in any way help it's practitioners to write good code and as PHP users poorly copy my favorite things from my other favorite languages they always miss the mark and loudly complain when the shortcomings are pointed out.

I've wasted far too much time responding to you, so you just keep smearing digital shit on the walls, I have code to ship.

I've worked in C++, Java, Ruby and PHP. I'm aware of what PHP has to offer and compared to the tooling in other languages PHP is anemic at best and a fractal of bad design at worst.

You're getting very tribal and Ad-hominem in your attacks because I don't share any affection for PHP and consider the whole language to be a mistake. Since PHP 5.3 things have been moving in the right direction, but it's too little too late as a language. As for tooling everything is a half assed copy of something from the Ruby ecosystem. If you have some tips for tools comparable to Pry in Ruby or any practical REPL or and interactive debugger comparable to VisualStudio or Eclipse please by all means share, but keep your worthless snipes to yourself.

I consistently find myself frustrated when working in PHP not because I've not mastered it, but because all of the other languages I've mentioned have a better developer experiences, better tooling and consistent APIs. PHP in my experience has none of these and your response and not changed my thoughts.

The project I mentioned is a legacy codebase that needs lots of work to even get it to consistently raise exceptions. Many places things happen trigger_error is used, which is not caught by Honeybadger(basically the same as Airbrake) and configuring the code to raise Exceptions for errors leads to bad behavior because previous programmers used trigger_error as a debug mechanism as well. Also there are no tests, so there is no good starting point to correct the transgressions that many PHP programmers don't regard as problematic at all. It's the embodiment of everything wrong with PHP and correcting the abuses is an enormous effort.

I just looked at xdebug, it can't even come close to the Eclipse debugger for Java or Pry for Ruby.

I just get sad every time I see a new large investment in PHP because I've never had a positive experience using it compared to another language and I strongly believe that you can't polish a turd.

So it's a weak copy of Capistrano 2, but 10 years late and written in PHP? I'm confused, what is the benefit of copying an established software package. You'd be better served using the Capistrano 3 for complicated deploys and Mina for simple deploys. PHP is an awful language to write a DSL and in my opinion just plain awful to use. I prefer to write Ruby, but I don't rewrite every system I depend on in Ruby.

For the record I'm maintaining a site written in PHP and I dislike PHP for real reasons(poor tooling, poor REPL, poor standard library, poor syntax) not just because it's not the language I've used the most.

Can vs Should. While PHP is turing complete, there are much better toolkits for the jobs you described.

Um, I'm working on a PHP codebase at the moment. I hate the PHP standard library. It's awful and awkward, but my job is to make shit work, so I do, even if I hate every minute of it.

My brothers and I we're in the scouts and my dad was a den leader. In pinewood derby season we would design the cars how we want, rasp, sand and paint them until they looked perfect to us, scouts, not parents. When that was done, my dad drill cavity in the car (one year he went through the top of a car into his hand), fill the cavity with molten lead to max weight, then we'd wood putty, sand and touch up the paint. My den had great looking cars and we dominated these races.

The tech guys don't fill that crap out, they hire lackeys to push the paper. The DoD is an elaborate scam to employ secretaries.