On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 01:29:57AM +0900, Marc Heiler wrote:
> 
> I will take another approach and claim that the language
> used is and will be the biggest most influencing factor.
> It is exactly the reason why PHP became popular today -
> it beat Perl cgi scripts. It was easier to learn than perl.
> It had a good online docu. It concentrated on the web +
> database aspects.

Actually, while PHP is much easier to pick up for web development for the
majority of people who know nothing about programming and a fair bit
about (X)HTML, it's not easier to learn in and of itself.  This is
largely a side-effect of the other major reason, besides ease of
learning, that PHP has become so popular for low-end web development: its
availability as a markup-embedded templating language is ubiquitous,
whereas in most cases working with Perl requires CGI scripts and either
SSI or generating markup from those scripts yourself.

Perl has better online documentation than PHP, in my honest opinion.  For
one thing, it's more comprehensive and less likely to lead you astray.
It's hard to beat perldoc (which is available on the web in addition to
being available with the standard Perl distribution).


> Every language has different pros and cons, and there may be
> some cases where php really has more advantages than ruby.
> But in general ruby as a language is simply better than php.
> That includes the world wide web, but unfortunately there
> are a little problems. Rails for example, forces you to
> think in the rails-way, for the good or for the bad.
> (By the way, it would be cool to be able to
> embed ruby straight into a .php document... right now
> I am porting my legacy .php scripts to ruby, it takes
> quite long :P )

I'd rather just embed Ruby in markup for templating.  Luckily, we can do
that now (with eruby).


> 
> Personally, I am a bit unhappy that PHP is compared to Rails so
> often ... PHP should be compared to Ruby, and then if we can,
> Ruby should improve on the area where PHP has a slight edge.

What bothers me isn't so much that PHP is compared with Rails, but that
they're compared as if they're the same class of thing.  PHP is a
templating language.  Rails is a framework that uses Ruby as its
templating language.  If you're going to compare the two, compare the
fact that with Rails you have a framework in addition to a templating
language (for good or ill) in one case and just a templating language in
the other.

Then, perhaps, talk about either PHP frameworks or ways to use Ruby as a
templating language without a framework, once you determine whether you
should be using a framework at all.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
awj @reddit: "The terms never and always are never always true."