Big discussion. :-)

Just two comments from my side:

"Wordpress is enormous. Porting would be non-trivial."

I agree, and the same is valid for trac (python), mediawiki, wordpress, 
phpBB (php), and so on.

But it is good applications which help make a language more widespread. 
How many people came to Ruby via RoR?

As far as language design is concerned, I think ruby is a lot better 
than PHP.

So why not tackle those areas? I do not believe in "use the right tool 
for a job", because this effectively translates to "use the better 
application", no matter what language. I can understand speed reasons, 
like using C rather than ruby in case you really need the speed.

But I don't *want* to use php. As a user, I don't have to care - I can 
use a php-forum, or mediawiki, and never meddle into the ugly php code.
However, if I build my projects with ruby, then I want to use ruby AS 
MUCH as possible, simply because using ruby is a lot more fun than using 
php (or perl for that matter - I don't really have the same problem with 
python, from my point of view ruby and python are much closer these days 
than i.e. ruby and php).

Noone has to do a 1:1 porting. Just make the application useful enough 
to get a start with it, and extend from there. The old phpbb wasn't that 
sophisticated, but it got better and better lateron.

Wordpress has one thing going, which is simplicity (for a USER).

So I think ruby needs some more cool apps, especially web-apps. Whether 
these require one to use RoR or not is not so important, but they need 
exist.

"Perl does not encourage writing good code any more than PHP does.
And yes OOP in PHP5 looks much better than in Perl5."

Sure, we can argue about this. Ultimately it depends on the developer 
writing code. But I think we can all agree that certain languages, let's 
say after 3 years of heavy usage, make it significantly harder to 
understand what's going on. Take the lisp guys. They reason that the use 
of () is no problem for them since they don't even really see them.

Every language design has a big impact of the underlying code. Being 
succint is a huge plus of ruby here compared to php and perl. In my 
opinion a good language helps people become better developers as well - 
by giving them ways to express what they want, and making it as easy as 
possible.

After 3 years of php, and comparing it to 3 years of ruby, I can without 
a shadow of doubt state that ruby makes it a lot easier to write 
beautiful code than php does.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.