Language Popularity - PHP vs Ruby?

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

I decided to make this _rather_ short, because I think noone wants
to read a lot of long stuff. It is still too long though.
But please believe me, I thought some time about the content.

On http://www.langpop.com/ the author has some nice graphs.
The trend seems to show that PHP is (still) a very popular
language. PHP at the same time however, is a horrible
language compared to ruby. I also do NOT at all believe
that any speed difference was an important factor for
PHP's popularity rise, nor is today. I think PHP benefitted
from a growing web world, and in return helped (foster)
the web world grow as well, together with apache and MySQL.
(I remember the perl-cgi days ... )

Ruby has Rails, but Rails needs more libraries, and Rails has a
very specific world-view (MVC) whereas PHP basically just cares
about getting the c**p outta *SQL and the "thing done", as ugly
as it may be. We could use Ruby instead for web-stuff, but Ruby
as such lacks in this regard here and there, i.e. at times
mod_ruby was just a pain to install, online-docu for ruby is
still not that good (even though a lot has changed the last 2
years... Pickaxe was wonderful but things change so quickly...)
ruby-cgi stinks a bit since it does not report where it
found an error and is rather slow compared to a .php site,
and "killer apps" like a phpBB variant for _ruby_ do not
seem to shape up _without_rails (and even with rails, it
seems a LOT of work..)

Does anyone notice .rhtml files at all on the www?
I see .php pages all the time. (Almost) all the webshops use
them (yuck). Loads of blogs use php. The basic underlying task of
what these scripts do is so simple, but ruby doesnt grow in this
area as php did. Rails alone can not be the solution to compete
with php on that area (assuming we want that) due to the lesser
flexibility (I have experienced that MANY people who learn rails
are just outright confused by ruby...):

  - Simplicity sometimes beats conventions.
  - Ugliness sometimes beats beauty.

This is NOT an anti-rails post. This is a PRO post to get
ruby fit for the www. Or at least, fitter/better!

Back to www.langpop.com for querying top 3 "jobs wanted"
notes, PHP and SQL is among them (rank 3 / rank 1).
Yuck yuck yuck. But you see it still seems popular and I dare
claim they would be better off using what is *needed* to
complete a job in an elegant fashion - with ruby instead.
At least that is my firm opinion - well written ruby code
is shorter and more elegant than well written php code
of comparable "feature set".

The del.icio.us site was also "analyzed" on http://www.langpop.com/ -
ruby and python both seem more popular than in the other grows.
That must mean, that people search for both quite a lot.
For example, Ogre3d, Blender project and the small game
engine FiFE all have usable python bindings.
No perl, no lua, no ruby on that.
But ...

PHP also wins on del.icio.us and in fact is only beaten
by _JAVASCRIPT_ !
Does this hint at the importance of the www? :slight_smile:

My conclusio, even if people heard that too ofte... and I
promise to be silent about it for some months to :smiley:

  I think the www should be one of the most important
  aspects for ruby!

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

2

PHP isn't as consistent or beautiful as ruby, but it hardly matters
when you have online documentation like this:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/

We (the ruby community) really should have excellent, up-to-date,
comprehensive online documentation. Considering its online
documentation, it is amazing that ruby is as popular as it is.
Pickaxe I is great but stale now, and I am too cheap to buy the 2nd
edition (like millions of other college/grad students out there). Are
there any projects out there attempting to create good, online
documentation for ruby? Are we waiting for 2.0 before doing this?

I think the www should be one of the most important aspects for ruby!

Agreed, who wants to write up a library porting or ruby-izing
everything useful to www in PHP to ruby? Anyone? :slight_smile:

--john

3

Marc Heiler wrote:

Hi,

Does anyone notice .rhtml files at all on the www?

mod_rewrite

Pickaxe 2, dealing with 1.8, is as relevant today as the day it was
printed.

Rails has everything it needs and the amount of add-ons through gems,
plugins, generators, etc... is amazing.. please give specific examples
of a task you couldn't complete through rails and ask on the rails list
for a suggestion.

Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

@bwv549

The people updating ruby documentation do so on a voluntary basis. The
amount of work that has already went into it is staggering and I am sure
they would welcome more volunteers if you are interested.

ilan

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

4

...PHP at the same time however, is a horrible
language compared to ruby...PHP basically just cares
about getting the c**p outta *SQL and the "thing done", as ugly
as it may be...

The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language superiority thing. I'm new to Ruby, and I've been hanging out on this list for the past month or two. I'm not sure if you guys realize how many of your emails are anti-some-language or comparing Ruby's popularity to the others. It's really a turn-off. It's like an insecure woman looking in the mirror asking you if she looks OK. "Of course!," you say. "You're beautiful!" And then she asks you again and again...

I see .php pages all the time. (Almost) all the webshops use
them (yuck). Loads of blogs use php...Back to www.langpop.com for querying top 3 "jobs wanted"
notes, PHP and SQL is among them (rank 3 / rank 1).
Yuck yuck yuck...PHP also wins on del.icio.us and in fact is only beaten
by _JAVASCRIPT_ !

PHP code can also be beautiful if written correctly. Given the present circumstances, it sounds to me like you'd better go learn PHP. ; )

Michael

5

Ilan Berci wrote:

Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

mv index.php ~/public_html

Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of Ruby isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.

···

--
Alex

6

Hello,

The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language superiority thing. I'm new to Ruby, and I've been hanging out on this list for the past month or two. I'm not sure if you guys realize how many of your emails are anti-some-language or comparing Ruby's popularity to the others. It's really a turn-off. It's like an insecure woman looking in the mirror asking you if she looks OK. "Of course!," you say. "You're beautiful!" And then she asks you again and again...

Though I am trying to avoid (language) flame wars or anything related to them, I really have to disagree here. The above paragraph holds for the right-wing activists of the Rails party, but definitely not for Ruby in general. Most of the people here are coming from Java, C#, PHP and other languages, not necessarily leaving those behind. I have seen some serious Java (as well as other language, or language-agnostic) questions answered here without bashing or pointing out how X sucks.

I tried to ignite a Java vs. Ruby flame war once (in the favor of Ruby of course), and I was kicked in the *ss very quickly by quite a few guys here (not necessarily Java fanatics, just normal coders pointing out that language flame wars are pointless and Ruby doesn't need to prove it's superiority over anything), then the thread died off.

Of course that doesn't mean that emails like the one starting this thread do not come up from time to time, or that someone doesn't start some spontaneous bashing etc. However, in general, I find the Ruby mailing list the friendliest one if it comes to superiority proving (and a lot of other things, too). Individuals will always have different levels of 'insecure-womanhood' as you put it and a lot of other things as well, but in general, the Ruby community as a whole is definitely not like that.

I see .php pages all the time. (Almost) all the webshops use
them (yuck). Loads of blogs use php...Back to www.langpop.com for querying top 3 "jobs wanted"
notes, PHP and SQL is among them (rank 3 / rank 1).
Yuck yuck yuck...PHP also wins on del.icio.us and in fact is only beaten
by _JAVASCRIPT_ !

PHP code can also be beautiful if written correctly.

That's true for assembler code, too (though it definitely requires different glasses than those of an average Java/C++/PHP/Ruby programmer) and possibly for just any language out there. Proponents of Ruby are arguing that PHP is not OOP (a frequent reason for Perl guys to come over, too) which makes some advanced techniques quite hard to implement (like Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities etc.) and ... well I am starting to get into details so I am better switching off. </off>

Of course as we all know, all these languages we are talking about here are Turing complete, which basically means you can accomplish the same stuff in any of them. However, I guess you won't argue that it's a different feeling to code in asm, C, Perl, PHP, Java or Ruby for that matter. Rubyists are the most productive and feel the best when programming in Ruby. This is a very subjective thing, therefore it doesn't make too much sense to attack each other or argue over it (it's like bashing Chivas Regal on the Jack Daniels mailing list). If in your case the sweet spot is PHP, all the power to you. After programming in ~10 languages, I am staying with Ruby for now, until something better comes along.

Given the present circumstances, it sounds to me like you'd better go learn PHP. ; )

Be sure that most of the people here have tried PHP or something similar before (or even after) their encounter with Ruby, some are even mastering it and maybe even using it further. This is not an either/or situation: you can learn, use, heck, even like more languages at once.
You can stay with PHP forever, and put yet another language in your toolbox.

Peace,
Peter

···

___
http://www.rubyrailways.com
http://scrubyt.org

7

The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language
superiority thing.

Well, one often cited credo around here is that you should learn a new
language every x month, and I think that ruby profits a lot from this
attitude. Innovation often means wandering through unknown (as in
"where no man has been before" :slight_smile: or "foreign" territory and coming
back with new ideas.

8

Sorry to respond to such an old thread, but I didn't see this addressed at all.

PHP isn't as consistent or beautiful as ruby, but it hardly matters
when you have online documentation like this:

PHP: PHP Manual - Manual

Does this mean you don't know about

   http://ruby-doc.org/

or don't consider it to be "excellent, up-to-date, comprehensive online documentation"? As someone who started using Ruby when the only documentation was in Japanese, I find complaints about Ruby's current supposed lack of documentation (online or otherwise) to be surprising. The online docs aren't perfect, of course, but that's true of any documentation for any project which is still in active development. I personally find that the online docs cover 90% of what I need, and between referencing the source (which is where beauty very much DOES count) and the helpfulness of the community, the other 10% is more than covered.

We (the ruby community) really should have excellent, up-to-date,
comprehensive online documentation. Considering its online
documentation, it is amazing that ruby is as popular as it is.

What about Ruby's online documentation do you find lacking?

Are there any projects out there attempting to create good, online
documentation for ruby?

Yes, (since sometime in 2002):

   http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/status.html

is a good place to start if you're wanting to contribute your effort to the existing docs. And you wouldn't have voiced your criticism of the current docs if you weren't, right? :wink:

···

On Nov 6, 2007, at 12:25 PM, bwv549 wrote:

--
Michael Granger <ged@FaerieMUD.org>
Rubymage, Architect, Believer
The FaerieMUD Consortium <http://www.FaerieMUD.org/&gt;

9

Same as mv index.rb ~/public_html

leaving only the necessity to do some mod_ruby configuration.

(I'm not talking about Rails, just eruby)

···

On Nov 7, 12:19 pm, Alex Young <a...@blackkettle.org> wrote:

Ilan Berci wrote:
> Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

mv index.php ~/public_html

Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of Ruby
isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.

10

If by deployment of php, you mean using php in web development is trivial, yes it's true.
If by deployment of php, you mean installing and configuring a php interpreter is trivial, it is not true at all. It's quite a task.
All Apache modules can be a pain.

···

On Nov 7, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Alex Young wrote:

Ilan Berci wrote:

Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

mv index.php ~/public_html

Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of Ruby isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.

11

Peter Szinek wrote:

Hello,

The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language superiority thing. I'm new to Ruby, and I've been hanging out on this list for the past month or two. I'm not sure if you guys realize how many of your emails are anti-some-language or comparing Ruby's popularity to the others. It's really a turn-off. It's like an insecure woman looking in the mirror asking you if she looks OK. "Of course!," you say. "You're beautiful!" And then she asks you again and again...

Though I am trying to avoid (language) flame wars or anything related to them, I really have to disagree here. The above paragraph holds for the right-wing activists of the Rails party, but definitely not for Ruby in general. Most of the people here are coming from Java, C#, PHP and other languages, not necessarily leaving those behind. I have seen some serious Java (as well as other language, or language-agnostic) questions answered here without bashing or pointing out how X sucks.

This list has a permathread of "python v. ruby", and for the most part people are simply told to try both and see what makes you most happy.

That's not to say there aren't some people who prefer to attempt nasty smack-downs, but they are in the minority.

You can't just count the number of ranting pro-ruby posts; you also have to see if they aren't all coming from the same 2 or 3 people.

MINASWAN

···

--
James Britt

http://web2.0validator.com - We're the Dot in Web 2.0
http://www.rubyaz.org - Hacking in the Desert
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys

12

Heh, but don't start with a natural language. x would be at least in
the range of tens then :wink:

···

On 08/11/2007, tho_mica_l <micathom@gmail.com> wrote:

> The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language
> superiority thing.

Well, one often cited credo around here is that you should learn a new
language every x month, and I think that ruby profits a lot from this
attitude. Innovation often means wandering through unknown (as in
"where no man has been before" :slight_smile: or "foreign" territory and coming
back with new ideas.

13

To be fair, much as I love Ruby the PHP world does stand head and shoulders above in terms of the quality and usability of the documentation (that AND clause is very important). The Ruby docs are likely just as _complete_ in a technical sense, but the PHP docs are so much easier to use and search than the Ruby docs are.

THe PHP doc's ability to have user-contributed examples at the bottom of them is a fantastic resource, one I've taken advantage of more times than I can count. That you can search the docs from any page in the docs is also pretty nice (really, a basic requirement for online docs, in my opinion).

On the Rails side of things Alex Gorbatchev has done a pretty nice job with Noobkit (http://www.noobkit.com/\), again a resource I use quite frequently. That it also contains the Ruby docs is a huge boon but there's still much room for improvement.

I guess if I could have one wish for ruby-doc.org it would be to allow user-contributed comments and examples ala PHP.net. There's so much useful information and examples in this mailing list and on the web that having them centralized and context-sensitive per the relevant doc page would be awesome.

(My other wish would be to get rid of that three-pane top-frame approach and replace it with a comprehensive search field and decent index).

···

On 17-Dec-07, at 3:11 PM, Michael Granger wrote:

PHP: PHP Manual - Manual

Does this mean you don't know about

http://ruby-doc.org/

or don't consider it to be "excellent, up-to-date, comprehensive online documentation"? As someone who started using Ruby when the only documentation was in Japanese, I find complaints about Ruby's current supposed lack of documentation (online or otherwise) to be surprising

14

Hi --

···

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Vasyl Smirnov wrote:

On Nov 7, 12:19 pm, Alex Young <a...@blackkettle.org> wrote:

Ilan Berci wrote:

Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

mv index.php ~/public_html

Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of Ruby
isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.

Same as mv index.rb ~/public_html

leaving only the necessity to do some mod_ruby configuration.

(I'm not talking about Rails, just eruby)

I'm glad you pointed that out. This thread seems to be slipping into
Ruby/Rails confusion, or perhaps to have been based on that confusion
from the beginning.

David

--
Upcoming training by David A. Black/Ruby Power and Light, LLC:
   * Advancing With Rails, Edison, NJ, November 6-9
   * Advancing With Rails, Berlin, Germany, November 19-22
   * Intro to Rails, London, UK, December 3-6 (by Skills Matter)
See http://www.rubypal.com for details!

15

Vasyl Smirnov wrote:

···

On Nov 7, 12:19 pm, Alex Young <a...@blackkettle.org> wrote:

Ilan Berci wrote:

Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.

mv index.php ~/public_html

Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of Ruby
isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.

Same as mv index.rb ~/public_html

leaving only the necessity to do some mod_ruby configuration.

Am I wrong in thinking that mod_ruby runs all scripts in the same interpreter, so they all share a namespace?

--
Alex

16

However, PHP is already installed on many web hosting servers, The
number of admins capable of installing PHP (or having a test install
somewhere already) you see by just looking around in your IT
department is usually non-zero, not the same for Ruby.

There are also technical reasons for this. The mod_php has (after some
years of development) "sound security" (no more security holes than
the underlying POSIX). PHP has also a sound interpreter that you can
reset to the initial state which allows isolation of different
programs running in the apache workers, especially programs of
different users.

I guess once we get something like mod_ruby with similar level of
functionality as mod_php we could see it installed on some freewebs
(or cheapwebs at least) and people picking Ruby more often. Currently
you need dedicated hardware or equivelent to run a Ruby site which is
quite forbidding. Fixing this should be possible after 1.9.

Thanks

Michal

···

On 07/11/2007, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 7, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Alex Young wrote:

> Ilan Berci wrote:
>> Please site an example where you found PHP easier than rails.
> mv index.php ~/public_html
>
> Sorry, but it's true. Deployment of PHP is trivial, deployment of
> Ruby isn't. That's one big reason why it's as popular as it is.
>
>
If by deployment of php, you mean using php in web development is
trivial, yes it's true.
If by deployment of php, you mean installing and configuring a php
interpreter is trivial, it is not true at all. It's quite a task.
All Apache modules can be a pain.

17

Peter Szinek wrote:

Hello,

The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language superiority thing. I'm new to Ruby, and I've been hanging out on this list for the past month or two. I'm not sure if you guys realize how many of your emails are anti-some-language or comparing Ruby's popularity to the others. It's really a turn-off. It's like an insecure woman looking in the mirror asking you if she looks OK. "Of course!," you say. "You're beautiful!" And then she asks you again and again...

Though I am trying to avoid (language) flame wars or anything related to them, I really have to disagree here. The above paragraph holds for the right-wing activists of the Rails party, but definitely not for Ruby in general. Most of the people here are coming from Java, C#, PHP and other languages, not necessarily leaving those behind. I have seen some serious Java (as well as other language, or language-agnostic) questions answered here without bashing or pointing out how X sucks.

This list has a permathread of "python v. ruby", and for the most part people are simply told to try both and see what makes you most happy.

That's not to say there aren't some people who prefer to attempt nasty smack-downs, but they are in the minority.

You can't just count the number of ranting pro-ruby posts; you also have to see if they aren't all coming from the same 2 or 3 people.

You guys are absolutely right. My apologies for grouping everyone on the list into one group. That was stupid of me.

Michael

18

>> PHP: PHP Manual - Manual
>
> Does this mean you don't know about
>
> http://ruby-doc.org/

> or don't consider it to be "excellent, up-to-date, comprehensive
> online documentation"? As someone who started using Ruby when the
> only documentation was in Japanese, I find complaints about Ruby's
> current supposed lack of documentation (online or otherwise) to be
> surprising

To be fair, much as I love Ruby the PHP world does stand head and
shoulders above in terms of the quality and usability of the
documentation (that AND clause is very important). The Ruby docs are
likely just as _complete_ in a technical sense, but the PHP docs are
so much easier to use and search than the Ruby docs are.

No, php docs cover like 99.9% of the core functionality + standard
libraries. That cannot be said for Ruby. Some of the standard
libraries do not have any documentation at all, some of the details of
core functionality are only explained in the pickaxe which is not
integrated with rdoc.

However, the task of documenting PHP is much easier than that of
documenting Ruby. PHP only covers web, db, and supporting system
tasks. The situation for something like php-gtk might be quite
different. I do not know of any TUI library for PHP,and it's certainly
not in the core. Also there is nothing like yaml,
marshal,singleton,delegator,...

iirc they only reference the regexp library docs instead of explaining
the two regex flavours they use in detail. That's the joy of relying
of somebody else's stuff :wink:

Note that if it weren't for user contributed examples some of the core
function details would be far from clear. So the user contributed
comments are very valuable part of PHP documentation.

THe PHP doc's ability to have user-contributed examples at the bottom
of them is a fantastic resource, one I've taken advantage of more
times than I can count. That you can search the docs from any page in
the docs is also pretty nice (really, a basic requirement for online
docs, in my opinion).

You can more or less do that for rdoc because of the frames. Very
clunky, though.

On the Rails side of things Alex Gorbatchev has done a pretty nice job
with Noobkit (http://www.noobkit.com/\), again a resource I use quite
frequently. That it also contains the Ruby docs is a huge boon but
there's still much room for improvement.

Yes, and it would be only fair to compare PHP documentation with Rails
documentation, the scope is about the same.

I guess if I could have one wish for ruby-doc.org it would be to allow
user-contributed comments and examples ala PHP.net. There's so much
useful information and examples in this mailing list and on the web
that having them centralized and context-sensitive per the relevant
doc page would be awesome.

(My other wish would be to get rid of that three-pane top-frame
approach and replace it with a comprehensive search field and decent
index).

Creating what PHP has would require replacing the static rdoc frames
with dynamically generated scripted index-menu. It can be cached but
the scripts have to be in place to generate the menu for new queries
or when the docs get updated. It's not too hard but somebody has to
write the scripts :wink:
Tho comments would require even more complex site with database and whatnot.

Thanks

Michal

···

On 18/12/2007, Chris Cummer <chris@postal-code.com> wrote:

On 17-Dec-07, at 3:11 PM, Michael Granger wrote:

19

Chris Cummer wrote:

THe PHP doc's ability to have user-contributed examples at the bottom
of them is a fantastic resource, one I've taken advantage of more
times than I can count. That you can search the docs from any page in
the docs is also pretty nice (really, a basic requirement for online
docs, in my opinion).

Why can't we get something added to the core docs where there is a hyper
link or some kind of wiki that lets users add samples and explanations?
I bet that would grow into some full fledged documentation in short
order. Perhaps, when it is somewhat mature, someone could even turn it
into a freebie download PDF.

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

20

The following:

page-a.rb

#!/usr/local/bin/eruby
<%
class Foo
  def bar
    puts "Page A: Foo#bar<br>"
  end
end
def baz
  puts "Page A: baz<br>"
end
Foo.new.bar
baz
%>

page-b.rb:

#!/usr/local/bin/eruby
<%
class Foo
  def bar
    puts "Page B: Foo#bar<br>"
  end
end
def baz
  puts "Page B: baz<br>"
end
Foo.new.bar
baz
%>

works just fine.

I'm pretty new to both ruby and eruby, and only about to dive deeply
into the latter.
And yes, I've heard about some issues concerning the shared
interpreter, though I've yet to run into them.

The only problem so far was the need to turn on "RubyRequire auto-
reload".

···

On Nov 7, 1:11 pm, Alex Young <a...@blackkettle.org> wrote:

Am I wrong in thinking that mod_ruby runs all scripts in the same
interpreter, so they all share a namespace?