[avinashv]

One of the commenters on the site voiced exactly what I was thinking:

> The delivery is so dry that it almost comes off as serious. Very nice.

Humorous, and I imagine it's on the front page because it raked up 15 votes in an hour.

To anyone who thinks there is real advice here: you're wrong. I'm not saying one language is better than another, but PHP's advantages over Ruby are not these.

[yan]

I came here to rant on the linkbaitism (?) of saying "Lang X is better than lang Y," but was instead pleasantly surprised to find lighthearted satire.

[CalmQuiet]

Pretty funny stuff. Short and sweet.

More persuasive about gutting up and learning Ruby than the head-to-head debates I've slugged through.

—A novice.

[erlanger → CalmQuiet]

I hope you didn't find any of the sarcastic implications to be persuasive in their own right...#9 is unadulterated BS. In any case, I'm happy to keep fanboys out of the PHP and Perl communities...we know our languages have profound flaws, but like Terry Chay said,

Rails is like a rounded rectangle and PHP is like a ball of nails [...] When I say that PHP is a ball of nails, basically, PHP is just this piece of shit that you just put together—put all the parts together—and you throw it against the wall and it fucking sticks.

Were the Ruby community equally humble about their language's shortcomings, the programming blogosphere would be a far less annoying place.

Or better, #8, comparing the brevity of two trivial snippets:

  foo = {"zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3"}  
  bar = foo.keys.sort.slice(0,3)

As opposed to

  $foo = array("zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3");  
  $keys = array_keys($foo);  
  sort($keys);  
  $bar = array_slice($keys, 0, 3); 

Look, I can put stuff on one line too!

  $foo = array("zulu" => "1", "alpha" => "4", "golf" => "8", "bravo" => "3");  
  $bar = array_slice(sort(array_keys($foo), 0, 3));

Other than a couple boilerplate "array" prefixes, the code is pretty much identical.

[plinkplonk → erlanger]

"Were the Ruby community equally humble about their language's shortcomings,"

The ruby community and humble? the mind boggles ;-).

more seriously, in my opinion the ruby community is (mostly) sensible. Rails seems to attract all the fanboy cult ists. Sometimes this spills over into the ruby community.

If you see the latest kerfluffle over Twitter moving a bit of code from ruby to Scala most of the incoherent blabbering responses came from the rails crowd (e.g Obie Fernandez's response on his blog).

[CalmQuiet → erlanger]

Sorry. I should have been clearer:

I don't yet know enough to evaluate all the comparisons.

But it at least gets me "off the pot" to get on with a serious Ruby study.

[erlanger → CalmQuiet]

No need to apologize, that post was directed towards the crazies in the Ruby world. Good luck studying Ruby! It's a nice language.

[erlanger]

How did this crap make it to the front page? Digg's that-a-way.

[swombat → erlanger]

I think it's not all that bad, but it doesn't deserve the number 2 spot... there are better articles out there.

[habibur → erlanger]

I wish there was a "cancel your upvote" for those of us who vote first and then read the article afterwards :-) People like me might be part of the problem how this crap got to the first page.

[yef → erlanger]

Now I'm really curious. This was on the front page a few hours ago, now it's dead. What special powers does one need to kill a link? Is Hacker News being gamed already, the current solution being editorial oversight?

To be fair, the humor piece about a grad student's day also made the front page and had about the same intellectual value as this one did. But it was better written and better targeted to this community.

It seems that the community (not just this one) is a fickle mistress. I'm really curious how a system can be built to stabilize it.