I found a use for Ruby

…a place to send all the people who washed out coding PHP.

Commentary on Rails for PHP Developers

I haven’t read this book so I can’t comment, however, I have yet to read a good “Pragmatic Programmer Series” book. The one all the Rails developers jizz over, is so poorly written and full of errors, I am beside myself.

Please buy this book.

Not to emphasize the obvious, but if you can’t build a website in PHP, you must really, really suck. Be sure to shave your head and buy a MacBook on your way down the your path of enlightenment.

Don’t miss my book: Delphi for Rails Developers, you’ll be needing it next year. 😉

15 thoughts on “I found a use for Ruby

  1. Manuel Lemos,

    No, I mean Delphi, up from #12 to take Ruby’s former glory at #9.
    http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
    Not sure why they call it Delphi and not Object Pascal. I think it’s because the hits in their search terms that seed the stats are “Delphi.” I am well aware that they have Delphi for PHP. 😉
    http://terrychay.com/blog/article/delphi-for-php.shtml

    I’m taking a bet whether Lua will be the Language of the Year for 2008
    2006: Ruby
    2007: Python

    For the record, of the languages mentioned, I like PHP, Python, and I have a feeling I’d like Lua (don’t know it). I also liked learning Pascal and Object Pascal in high school. 🙂

  2. I think that’s a bit of a hard knock of the Pragmatic Bookshelf. I’ve had a number of books which I’ve really enjoyed from them; The Pragmatic Programmer and Practices of an Agile Developer spring to mind.

  3. Just wanting to brag a little, but I kicked ass in Pascal. I finished Pascal 1 so fast they moved me up to Pascal 2 half way through the semester!

  4. Forget Lua, Scala teh shiznit in ’08.

    Turbo Pascal was the best back in the day. I wrote a program to graph the Mandlebrot Set in Turbo Pascal when I was in high school. It was only like 10K lines of code and only took a couple of days to run on my $2K, 12 MHz 286.

  5. Terry, I was just being ironic too, regarding the fact that Delphi is more popular than Ruby according to TIOBE. I think that was due to Delphi for PHP, not really due to Delphi for Object Pascal.

    As for Ruby, it seems Borland/CodeGear Third Rail did not help. I am not sure if Third Rail is really a good name to give a Ruby IDE. It does not have Ruby in the name.

    As for you hitting on Ruby, never mind “beating on a dead horse”. PHP is popular because the Web is popular and PHP came first as a language focused on Web development. PHP will always be the number 1 for the (public) Web because it solves everybody’s problems and on the Internet, the number 2 is always much less popular than the number 1.

    Never mind about people that switch to Ruby. They just do that because they want to be different, not necessarily better. Note that most of them have different (read metrosexual) hair do and always use Macs. 😉

    Some that tried to switch to Ruby, later returned to PHP, because they realized that they are not different from the crowd. PHP is all they needed, not the distractions of forced design patterns in bloated frameworks.

    All of this to say that the days of Ruby being the “language of the jour” are passing. Let them figure out by themselves.

  6. though messy, php is a very humble, powerful web dev lang with a very friendly community.

    rails is great but they think they’re the best things arround. ah, let them brag: your biggest threat is your own success.

    hopefully php may learn loads about MVC, CoC and DRY. it well needs it.

  7. @Manuel: I stand corrected. 🙂 I’m not surprised that Third Rail doesn’t help. The Ruby world has been lax to adopt Eclipse simply because it isn’t written in Ruby, but Java. 🙂

    (I’ll be sure to get a metrosexual haircut. It’ll probably make me a better Ruby developer.)

    @pt: Rails has a friendly community as long as you don’t point out its shortcomings. I’ve already spoken out against Convention Over Configuration in past blog entries (it’s a nice idea, but very costly), and Don’t Repeat Yourself has been preached as good design ever since Fowler wrote Refactoring. I don’t think that the Ruby on Rails world can lay claim Model View Control or Don’t Repeat Yourself as both predate the existence of Ruby by a country mile. 😉

  8. @tychay: Please tell Ruby to stop siddling up to D – it’s unseemly. If it wants to share it’s misery it should seek out Coldfusion… At least that’s somewhere in the anonymous middle, far from the well buried and nondescript company of Erlang…

  9. >(I’ll be sure to get a metrosexual haircut. It’ll probably make me a better Ruby developer.)

    heh 🙂 There definitely is an “annoying hipsters” quality to the RoR crowd, both in looks and general attitude.. I don’t know what’s the SF equivalent, but reading some RoR blogs does feel like walking around Williamsburg (the Brooklyn neighborhood)

    OTOH while Rails didn’t invent CoC, MVC and DRY, it did a lot to bring them to the attention of Web developers, as a byproduct of the amazing hype it received, and that’s generally a good thing.

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