As I told Ed Finker,

“Newbie, did I forget to tell you he just likes it when people say his name?”
—Dr. Cox, Scrubs Season 5

Unfortunately, Ed didn’t oblige me like he did last time. But luckily for me, Sean and Paul did. 🙂

With Cal’s PHP Abstract now on the air, the busy developer may be wondering which they should listen to. It’s simple, if you have to choose, I’ve been mentioned three times on Pro::PHP Podcast and not once on PHP Abstract.

Verdict: I recommend Pro::PHP Podcast 😀

[Paul and Sean are the Kevin and Bean of the PHP world after the jump.]

Me Me Me (with commentary)

Paul: Terry Chay’s rant about Ruby… I like Terry Chay. [Who doesn’t]

Sean: Yeah, me too.

Paul: I had an opportunity to meet him at ZendCon last year. And it was a really intense conversation. [Thanks, Buy this guy’s book!]

Sean: Yeah.

Paul: …a very high energy guy. [Must be all the Red Bull I swiped from Facebook.]

Sean: Terry’s weird, man. Terry’s that guy you see like…he’s like this really small guy who comes out of nowhere and he’s usually got a camera plastered to the front of his face so you can’t really tell what he looks like when you first meet him. [Hint: I look damn good! 😀 ]

And, he’s got this weird lens thing that he plays with his fingers with so it kinda does weird things—an old accordian style lens that comes out of the front—he’s blogged about it.

And he just starts talking and he gets really animated and he’s like an incredibly smart guy and he knows all kinds of stuff and he’s just like “over the top”—he could be a puppet. [Where is my bobblehead?]

Paul: *laughter* (unintelligable)

Sean: Not like in a bad way. He could be a character in a movie. [My students in Engineering Physics thought I should be some MTV reality show and Ed said somehting similar—I suppose this is a step up.]

He’s got a good sense of humor, I don’t think he’ll actually hunt me down. [Think again.]

Paul: No. [You want a piece of this too?]

Sean: Plus he doesn’t know my address. [I know it’s somewhere Canada. And how many people can there be up there?]

Paul: But he’s written a couple good things, I’ll give that to him.

Sean: He’s written a lot of good things, I think. [Read my blog. Every post is a gem. Where’s my @#&*ing Pulitzer?]

Paul: So you want to talk about his recent post?

Sean: Yeah, just briefly. You should go read it, anybody who hasn’t read it yet. But, he’s posted a few times a response to the Ruby community complaining about PHP and internals—the stuff that is going on there. I hate to say he’s knocking the Ruby guys down a notch because I don’t think he has that much power…

Paul: Terry Chay has as much power as you give him and a lot of people give him a lot of power. [Who? Give me their names and medication they are on. I need to prescribe it to all my enemies.]

Sean: (That’s true.)²

Paul: And he has sexy graphs. [Infoporn!]

Sean: *laughter*

Paul: A lot of blog posts that he does have real fun things associated with them.

Sean: Yeah.

Paul: What was the one—not the most recent blog post—one a little while back that had a really cool graphic about Ruby.

Sean: Ruby: now with 75% more Ghey.

Paul: Yeah that was it! G-H-E-Y?

Sean: Yeah, G-H-E-Y. [You know you’re famous when you can shamelessly steal a graphic from Ed Finkler and take credit for it. Sorry, Ed. 🙂 ]

Paul: His most recent post was “Have we reached Peak Ruby?” Obviously a homage to Peak oil.

Sean: We’ll talk about that—we can talk about that now, but I wanted to mention the TIOBE language…

Paul: Looking at the show notes: “Terry Chay rants about Ruby”…

Sean: (Yeah)³. He’s talking about Ruby dropping down. His post a week or two before that. This post you’re talking about right now is like a response to the numbers of Ruby going down. And, there is like this organization that rates programming languages based on community popularity and …

Paul: Numbers drawn out of a hat. Continue.

Sean: There are a few stories flying around right now about PHP remaining strong at #4 where it’s been for the last year. It actually shows as #5 but a lot of people put C and C++ together. [Oops! I still say PHP is going to go down. 🙂 ]

Paul: It’s actually #5 but people can’t count. Or no, maybe it’s zero-indexed.

Sean: Oh, maybe. That makes sense.

Paul: There we go.

Sean: *laughter* So behind Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic is PHP which is no small feat. And this isn’t just the number of domains, it is the number of people actually using it, or so they say in their surveys. In the last months, Ruby been…

Paul: *jet sounds*

Sean: been sloping up. In the last month, it’s been curving down. And it is entirely possible that it is a statistical anomaly or people are on vacation and they don’t want to bother filling out the surveys, or whatever.

What this last post is one of his friends saying, “Hey, Terry, you killed Ruby.”

Paul: *laughter*

Sean: Like “your rants about Ruby and performance… it’s dropping. You singlehandedly killed it!” [It’s on Google, it must be true.]

Paul: That’d be awesome.

Sean: *laughter* So maybe he does have more power than we give him.

Paul: That’d totally be like my resume or my business card. Paul Reinheimer: The guy who killed Ruby…

(Some stuff about Andrei and segways)

Sean: “Sean Coates singlehandedly saved the future of PHP.” I’m actually putting that on my resume.

Paul: So we’re actually talking about Terry Chay. [Yes, me!] You have the quote: “sediment disturbed.”

Sean: Yeah. I use the word sediment because we don’t have the “Explicit” tag. [This is a reference to how they had to pull the feed from iTunes due to my creative vocabulary and bleeped out Ed Finkler’s podcast. See: “Blood, Sweat and Swear.”]

(some stuff about iTunes)

Sean: So we’re talking about Terry Chay and his posts… You really need to go read it if you haven’t. I don’t know how to sum it up well, even. I think some of the important things he talked about were: Ruby doesn’t scale very well—or if it does it takes a lot of work—and sometimes that really matters and sometimes it doesn’t matter. And a lot of times with the sort of apps that people are creating with Rails it doesn’t matter…

Paul: You mean the one app people are creating twenty times? [Ahh, Frameworks, my old nemesis]

Sean: Yeah. Or the seven apps people are creating a hundred times.

Paul: *laughter* [Unintelligable] is going to kill me.

Sean: His point was that the guys who were talking about Rails scalability don’t have any clue because their sites don’t push nearly as much traffic as Twitter which is the most trafficked Ruby application ever imagined… [besides 43 Things and CourseAdvisor]

Paul: …and it sucks. [Damn straight!]

Sean: You know I never really got into it and I’m really afraid to. Plus my phone doesn’t do SMS very well so…

Paul: I tried adding the Twitter AIM Bot and I obligingly twittered for a week. But then I found out that it didn’t actually record anything… [Received via IM from a PHP developer: “Twitter can’t even get IM fucking working right. How hard is it? Sheesh.”]

Sean: *laughter* Awesome! Anyway, Terry’s point was that there are some scalability issues in Rails especially and you need to take it with a grain of salt. He had a couple of follow up posts where he said, “Guys I was joking about a lot of the stuff I said.” And Terry’s that kind of guy—he’ll say stuff like that just to get a reaction. [I learned from the master.]

Paul: Like “Postgres has two users.” [On July 3rd, 2004. I bet Sterling that in two years Postgres would not be as popular as MySQL two years later (according to a job listing search). He owes me a beer.]

Sean: Yes! If you haven’t read it, you should go check it out… [Hehe. I love it when Canadians say “out.”]

Paul: I really thought you had more to say about it. It was basically two lines and you had like three seconds of content and 15 minutes of you rambling. [Umm yeah, you should have mentioned me like 10 more times and recommended people read this blog about 20 more. Geez! I’m withholding that check I promised.]

Sean: So? What’s your point?

Paul: Yeah, that’s the podcast.