DHH's response to "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails" | Hacker News Reader

DHH's response to "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails"

loudthinking.com

12 pointsbrett8 comments

The CDBaby rewrite was well-known in the Rails community.

However, I don't recall anyone in that community telling him that it might not be such a good idea.

Anyways, compare Derek's current observations with this: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/01/cd_baby_rewrit...

and

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/11/migrating_to_rub...

the original post was not very pertinent anyway, as far as ruby/rails is concerned. All 7 reasons have almost nothing to do with ruby/rails:

#1 - "is there anything rails/ruby can do that php can't do? ... (thinking)... no."

#2 - our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration

#3 - don't want what i don't need

#4 - it's small and fast

#5 - it's built to my tastes

#6 - i love sql

#7 - programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better

He lost me at #1. Technically, there's so many things Rails and Ruby can do that PHP can't. If he means it pragmatically (they're both data/web connect-o-thingies), then he has a point.

<<So many things Rails and Ruby can do that PHP can't>>

Meta-programming? What else? Do you mean the language or accompanying libraries?

It's interesting that no one has a problem comparing a Framework to a straight-up language. You'll never get an accurate comparison this way and I think that's a huge point. Everyone marvels at what RoR can achieve in terms of logic/decision/data/presentation separation, but doesn't take into account that there are probably 20 or so PHP frameworks that also implement the MVC approach and do a lot of the same things while maintaining the flexibility of php.

Arguably, Ruby does things better/lighter/cleaner/more elegantly than PHP, but at the end of the day, they're both accomplishing the same business objective. And when the end result is the same, what PHP provides in the way of stability/industry uptake/user community/compatibility outweighs whatever gains in "programmer happiness" and all the other intangibles commonly flailed about by the Ruby/Rails community.

Why editorialize the title?!

Really? That bad? Why not? I like editorialized titles, and without the editorial DHH's post is essentially a linkjack to something fairly old.

I toned it down. Is that better?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com