Ruby or PHP which one is for you

Will Ruby kill PHP?

With the recent rise in popularity of the Ruby programming language (largely driven by the excellent but not perfect web framework called Rails), I’ve noticed a little fear in the air … fear on the part of some people in the PHP community.

Will Ruby kill PHP?

The short answer is: NO.

MY REASONING

Though Ruby and PHP are both scripting languages that make developing web applications much easier than it is, say in the Java world, they are very different beasts … each appeals to a different audience.

RUBY IS ELEGENT BUT COMPLEX

Before I go on, I want to point out that Ruby is a great language and I think it makes perfect sense for PHP developers to learn a little Ruby: it is always a good idea to learn other languages because it will make you a better programmer.

That said, I believe Ruby will not appeal to, or fill the need of most PHP’ers – Ruby can be a little too abstract.

JAVA NERDS LOVE RUBY

Ruby is attracting many from the Java world because it expresses very advanced concepts in a simple syntax – contrast this to Java’s (often times) kludgy and verbose representation.

Ruby appeals to the Java crowd because Java people have been trained to think in terms of large scale enterprise applications – regardless of the size of the project.

… These ‘abstractions’ (generally speaking) lend themselves well to larger projects.

WHY PHP WORKS

PHP is often criticized because it has both a procedural and an object oriented way of doing things. Some people think that this divergence (within the language), takes away from it … I think this is part of its strength!

Objected oriented constructs are great for creating cleaner designs that are easier to maintain and promote the possibility of code reusability. Code reuseability is an often touted advantage of OOP, but from what I’ve seen in the Java world, it is not achieved so often.

With OOP, there is a cost of added complexity and overhead – you simply have to write more code to do things when you do it via OOP.

PHP PROVES THAT NON OO LANGUAGES STILL HAVE THEIR PLACE

I would suggest that the vast majority of PHP work is found in simple projects:

* Email from a web page.
* Process a simple form and save to a database.
* Create a simple store with 10 items.

My point is, that for many PHP projects, OOP may be a little overkill.

WHY RUBY WILL NOT KILL PHP

In Ruby everything is an object (even numbers!) and the core language has very sophisticated constructs that need to be understood to use Ruby effectively – Ruby strength is also its’ weakness.

… I don’t see the majority of PHP users wanting to jump that deep into the world of programmatic abstraction – for most, there is simply no point.

Ruby is a very clean language and it has lots of things going for it. But PHP has lots of things going for it too. You can point out spots where Ruby code is cleaner than PHP, but you can point out spots where (I think) PHP code is cleaner than Ruby …

Today I would consider PHP the better choice because it is well established (lots of IDEs, open source projects, easy hosting etc ..) and proven.

Ruby is just starting to get into the mainstream … and there are still some fundamental issues with Ruby and web development.

For example: Ruby integration with APACHE is still not stable. It works … but there are known problems and can be a hassle to set up.

Ruby has a long way to go, I can’t argue for the programming details as I still like my Perl but from the SysAdmin side Ruby and Rails for the matter are an absolute nightmare.

Ruby in itself is slow, doesn’t understand threads like every other language out there so it doesn’t integrate into apache like PHP or Perl or Python or the other hundreds of web scripting languages.

Until Mongrel came out you were forced to use fast_cgi, which is a dead method of rendering pages, apache’s mod_fcgi is crap and lighttpd’s fcgi is better but the server itself is not stable enough for production.

Ruby has to start by modernizing it’s preprocessor before it even has a small chance in hell of overtaking PHP and even then Rails has a long way to go before it’s ready for the primetime, the ease at which a programmer can cause Rails to leak memory is astounding.

By: Stefan Mischook in Killersite.com

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