7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. After two years working on a Rails rewrite of CD Baby, Derek Sivers scrapped it and instead rewrote the PHP version using Rails-inspired design principles. Derek would still use Rails for a greenfield project though.
Sign in with 
OpenID
Flame war in 5..
The major reason I dislike Ruby is because of its zealot-like fanboys.
Look at the comments to Derek's post - rather than trying to work out what Ruby (or more exactly, Rails) didn't help him with, they immediately jump in to flaming him. Hell, I'd bet DHH himself will drop by shortly and tell Derek to f*** himself.
I'm sorry, but this type of community just convinces me that Rails users are 13 year olds who've managed to write my-first-blog-application (tm) and subsequently fell in love.
Anyone who's not a zealot knows that frameworks and languages have drawbacks. Some work better on certain types of problem domains. Deal with it.
--Simon
Simon G. - 23rd September 2007 10:29 - #
Wow. This certainly perpetuates the common stereotype of programmers being rude assholes without any social skills, huh?
Robb Irrgang - 23rd September 2007 17:07 - #
Everyone knows that Ruby is the Amiga of programming languages ;-)
Fredrik - 23rd September 2007 20:16 - #
I don't think jumping to quick conclusions does much good for anyone's camp.
I use Rails and Django, and they're both really different philosophies to solve the same problems.
I like both. Just as I like both Ruby and Python. Both are excellent languages.
Derek Sivers' experience with Rails was his own damn fault. He did the one thing you're never supposed to do with any project or it will most likely go to hell. He spread his resources too thin. He didn't learn the framework nor did he ever really learn the language. So he wrote (what looks like one of those website ad sites by the way)a simple site in a language he felt more comfortable in. And instead of using an already existing PHP MVC framework he decided to roll his own and called it beautiful without providing the rest of the world with this "beautiful" code. His arguments are for the most part nil and his 7 reasons should really be taken as more of a straw man argument.
To reiterate, Derek's folly was not with Rails but his lack of understanding with the framework and his inability to grasp concepts and restrictions presented by the framework. Maybe he would have had more luck with Django? Probably not. Django may give you more freedom but ultimately he would have ran into the same problems.
Those are just my thoughts on the subject feel free to lambast me with negative feed back :)
Sean Bryant - 25th September 2007 16:37 - #