
Will Rails be the new PHP? - roytomeij
http://roy.io/jzo
======
jeffclark
It's the strangest thing. It's like having a blog and access to Hacker News
makes self-proclaimed "seasoned" programers forget that they, too, probably
had really crappy code when they started programming.

Instead of bashing green programmers who coincidentally became interested
programming at the same time that Rails makes it so easy to start, why not
offer them up a list of resources to make them better?

Humans are only born knowing how to cry and swallow. Nobody's born knowing how
to program. Let's give Rails the props it deserves for lowering the barrier to
entry for making web applications and look forward to the future where these
new programmers are making things to make our lives easier.

~~~
ehutch79
He's not bashing green programmers. He's bashing on programmers with years
under their belt who never got any better, and don't participate in any
community.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"I'm worried about the portion of Rails developers who sucked at their
> previous language. Or the ones who got started with Rails as their first
> "language" without finding the proper (or current) resources or guidance"_

No, he really isn't. He is _totally_ bashing green programmers.

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jacques_chester
Will linkbait be the new inflammatory headline?

Will handwaving be the new fluff?

Will insubstantial murmurings be the new mumbling into whiskers?

Will this turn out to be a useful blog post or is it just a bunch of questions
that can't be answered because they're pretty close to meaningless?

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mindstab
um no?

PHP "has a relatively small community, with the majority of people working
under the radar and on their own?" ?

Where is he getting these stats? relative to what? For instance

[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

Says PHP the language is more popular than Ruby the language (let alone the
subset of Ruby programmers who use Rails). I don't get where that perceived
smallness comes from. In all my experience and every way I've seen the PHP
community is vastly larger than the Ruby community. Also comparing a language
to a Framework seems... weird. It might make more sense to compare Rails to
Drupal at least, which again, in the enterprise world, I have seen waaay more
Drupal installs than Rails ones. There are a few high profile Rails sites but
it quickly seems to drop off into hobby and startup. Meanwhile Drupal is just
_everywhere_. It's surprising.

Also, accusing the PHP community of "writing below par software while charging
their clients for it?" is hilarious coming from the Rails camp. Generally
lowering the bar for entrance while making it easier for good devs to get good
work done faster also allows more "bad" devs to enter as well. Anyone remember
earlier this year that core Rails bug that allowed people to overwrite almost
all data that most big Rails sites were affected by (including github)

<https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228>

I cannot understand where this viewpoint is coming from, it seems hilarious
(and at best, the criticisms seem like the pot calling the kettle black).

~~~
mattyfo
Sort of a tangent here but I've been trying to decide if our organization
needs to move away from using Drupal for custom application development. You
see to have some experience, what are your thoughts on it for highly
customized web applications?

~~~
Jgrubb
Personally, I've been doing Drupal for a few years now and found the knowledge
and skills to be a lot harder-won than the knowledge and skills that I've
picked up with Rails in the last few months. The knowledge and skills that
I've picked up working with Drupal (HTTP, Databases, etc) more or less
translate into general app development, so that surely has something to do
with it.

I said this to my wife this morning - "you know what, building stuff in Rails
just feels like it accesses my creative brain more than anything I've done
before." Having been exposed to some of what Acquia is doing with their cloud
hosting stuff I can say with a fair amount of certainty that almost anything
under the sun can be accomplished with Drupal, but that's (the creative bit)
probably why I'm on a Rails kick lately. It's just more fun (to me). The
overhead does feel lower, too.

Sorry if that didn't lend any insight to your actual question.

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kaiuhl
While new developers are coming up learning Ruby as their first language and
in the context of Rails, keep in mind that Rails introduces you to much of the
core Ruby language, idioms and at least a few design patterns and useful
abstractions. It also adds Sass and Coffeescript. There's much more complexity
and therefore knowledge required for a "whiz kid" to build a useful Rails app
that it's hardly a fair comparison. This "subpar software" meets a need that
seasoned developers can't or won't.

Also of note: it's no longer 1999. People expect a bit more out of their
website than during the glory days of the independent 19-year-old PHP
developer. These novices are orders of magnitude more capable than PHP
developers of a decade ago. These folks building one-off websites for clients
are also often doing both design and development—something many developers are
awful at.

This elitism should stop. Programming is a means to an end, and we should
welcome any and everyone despite their level of commitment, talent, or focus.

------
gtCameron
Does Tiger Woods sit around thinking about how all of the weekend hackers at
the local country club are making the game of golf worse?

Nope, its the exact opposite, the more popular the game is the more the people
at the top of it stand out. If you think you are the shining example of the
elite Ruby programmer you should be doing everything you can to get more
people involved in the ecosystem, the bigger that gets the better
opportunities you'll have in the future.

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JulianWasTaken
There's really only one paragraph here that remotely tries to explain the
headline:

"The PHP where there are lots of people writing below par software while
charging their clients for it? The PHP that has a ton of websites with crappy
advice and crappy code to copy/paste? The PHP which has a relatively small
community, with the majority of people working under the radar and on their
own?"

I'm a Python developer. Do you have any idea how much crappy Python code and
crappy advice is on the internet? Take a look at the StackOverflow homepage at
any given moment. Every language has developers at every stage of the learning
process. And every language has developers who have stunted in the learning
process.

So, this is ridiculous. The answer is no. Rails provides infinitely better
tools in a better language than PHP.

~~~
Firehed
> So, this is ridiculous. The answer is no. Rails provides infinitely better
> tools in a better language than PHP.

You're making a highly subjective and unqualified comparison of a language to
a framework, and (given past citations in similar discussions) probably using
information to do so that's at least five years out of date. This after saying
you're a python dev so presumably not especially well versed in either
language/framework (do correct me if I'm wrong)

Like you say, there's a lot of bad code out there. PHP is notorious for it due
to its shallow learning curve and widespread availability on cheap servers.
The authors point is that the barrier to entry on ruby/rails appears to be
quickly dropping and asks whether it will suffer the same fate.

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conrey
The level of elitism in the Ruby and by extension Rails communities never
ceases to amaze me. Having attended several ruby and rails conferences over
the last few years, the belief that Ruby is the language of "good programmers"
is so prevalent as to be off putting.

~~~
gaius
They aren't mere programmers, they're "rockstar ninjas" (in their own minds).

------
devmach
I really enjoy when arrogant geeks tries to bash language X. They will never
learn their language is just a tool and as long as you follow best practices
it doesn't matter what language you are using.

And i really don't understand why particularly rails developers looks down to
newcomers. If you want to help your community just write tutorials, share your
experiences from real life, help to newbies and make other's life easier. If
you want to entertain other peopler, well , just write crappy blog posts with
such title like " Will X be new Y ? "[1]

[1] : But please read first the article about "Betteridge's Law of Headlines"
on Wikipedia.

------
ExpiredLink
Usage of server-side programming languages for websites (30 September 2012):

    
    
      PHP      78.1%
      ASP.NET  21.0%
      Java     4.0%
      ColdFusion  1.1%
      Perl     0.9%
      Ruby     0.5%
      Python   0.2%
    

[http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_languag...](http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all)

~~~
Kudos
I'm not sure what your point is to begin with, but I am highly skeptical of
the scientific nature of this report.

~~~
ExpiredLink
"See technologies overview for explanations on the methodologies used in the
surveys."

~~~
Kudos
I saw it, it's totally hand wavey.

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j45
This not in my backyard eliteism is a problematic mindset, especially geeks
hating on geeks, who probably weren't that popular in school themselves.

Kind of ironic.

Tools are just tools. Most are capable and have good web frameworks.

Opinion and preference is largely what most posts like these are based on,
while it's free to have your opinion and preference of what tools you use,
judging others, and how and if they may learn is another thing.

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tisme
If you want to compare rails to something compare it to Yii.

If you want to compare something to PHP compare it to Ruby.

Comparing Rails and PHP is just plain dumb.

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joshcrews
Maybe. If Ruby / Ruby on Rails is a good language for web-development, easy
for beginners to learn, the community is helpful, beginners feel welcome, and
experienced developers invest in teaching; you'd expect to find a small army
of 'just get it to work' developers knocking out small projects and charging
too little.

I'm ok with that. Small projects get done. Not everyone needs a $125/hr
consultant. Some of those projects will grow and need more experienced
developers. All of those beginner developers will gain experience. Some of
those beginner developers will continue to grow, learn testing, learn better
software design principles and start contributing to the community.

If Ruby on Rails has, or were to have, a small army of beginner developers
writing poor code on small projects and charging too little for it; I think it
would be a healthy thing.

Disclosure: I got started as a Rails-first-language developer and have loved
every second of it. And I try to get new people started with web-development
using Rails and hope to see them get their first small projects that they can
write bad code for and get paid anything for.

~~~
rjbond3rd
> If Ruby on Rails has, or were to have, a small army of beginner developers
> writing poor code on small projects and charging too little for it; I think
> it would be a healthy thing.

Hmm, well I see your point, but disagree. It's just like the WordPress
situation for small businesses.

Someone comes in (usually a "designer") and cobbles some WP plugins and a
template into a seemingly okay site for $500, but eventually the small
business owner hits the limitations of that arrangement, and (from what I've
observed) good programmers won't even take $5,000 to salvage a mess like that.

And not only does the customer end up feeling burned, it also leaves behind
some toxic consequences, e.g., the customer has no idea what programming costs
nor the difference between a prototype and production quality. So while we all
start somewhere, this kind of low-rent ecosystem has certain enduring negative
consequences (evident on Craigslist).

------
protomyth
Taking just the title, not likely. The lesson of PHP is that it is easy to get
something running for a beginning programmer, and (probably more importantly)
it is very simple for a system administrator to setup. I get the feeling that
the first web framework that spends and equal amount of time figuring out how
to make system installs and administration easy will take over for PHP.

------
prezjordan
Rails has a steeper learning curve than PHP. And I can't see Rails (easily)
being sloppily-disorganized like PHP can.

So I'm going to go with no.

~~~
trevelyan
You can program messy Ruby as easily as messy PHP. Rails is an MVC framework.
PHP has plenty of those as well.

~~~
prezjordan
Right, but Rails will always have some sort of organization. That being said
it _is_ possible to go against the grain and not use Rails' default directory
structure - but that's difficult.

I'm comparing Rails to vanilla PHP - just as the author is. People are exposed
to PHP's low barrier of entry (again, vanilla here) because you can write an
application with PHP/Apache/mySQL very quickly. However, because of this, most
instances are very hacky.

~~~
devmach
Please don't compare a framework with a language, even someone before did it.

~~~
prezjordan
I'm comparing RoR to the act of running PHP scripts on Apache. Both are
processes - this is also what the article addresses.

~~~
trevelyan
You don't think Ruby on Rails requires the overhead of a server???

There are perfectly good and very sophisticated MVC frameworks available for
PHP, such as CakePHP (one of the closer to Rails, even down to the command-
line "baking" of models, controllers, etc.).

There are meaningful differences to development using both languages, but
criticizing PHP because it was popularized independently of any specific
framework is not one of them. Especially since there are plenty of situations
(think dumb but scalable web services) in which the last thing you want to do
is invoke the overhead of a framework in any language.

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craig552uk
Do some people who do some stuff do stuff better than other people who do
stuff worse?

Yes.

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trotsky
tl;dr - the author plans to switch to node

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recursive
Where's my $4/month rails hosting?

~~~
muloka
<https://www.appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/>

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PaulHoule
I've seen this playing out for at least five years.

For a long time rails has attracted developers who are strong in design but
weak in programming.

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nerd_in_rage
No, that's unlikely. PHP's main advantage is its ease of deployment on shared
web hosts: upload your files and you're done.

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fijal
This article has unresizable font as the main font. How am I even supposed to
read that?

