There'll always be some degree of learning and adjusting. But a mallet is still an improvement over a rock, because it's designed to fit in a human hand. I doubt anyone scoffed at the mallet and blogged that rocks have 80% market share so why can't we just get over it already.
I think the analogy fails because trucks and sedans are different tools for different purposes (one is better for transporting people, one is better for transporting cargo), while PHP and Ruby pretty much do the same thing, one is just prettier and streamlined.
Says who?
>>> one is just prettier and streamlined.
By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"?
Says the fact that PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup. It's impossible to shove a refrigerator into the back of a sedan, but there is no analogous refrigerator that PHP xor Ruby is incapable of hauling.
By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"?
Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP.
>>> Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP.
Consensus of whom? "Nobody I know voted for him", right?
That's a straw man, I didn't use that as a criteria.
PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup
See that? That's me describing specific qualities of the languages that make them similar. Of course, you could use Ruby or PHP to write a graphics engine (in fact, I have done so with Ruby), but that is not a common use case. Most of the time, Ruby and PHP are used to solve the same set of problems: scripting server-side logic for the web.
Consensus of whom?
The internet? The programming community? That's why I used the "nebulous" qualifier. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's a pretty popular sentiment which is about as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste.
Yes, PHP and Ruby are different, but most of the time they are used to do the same thing.
Yes, they are both imperative, non-compiled and can be used to do network connections and output texts. Doesn't really narrow it down. Any further restriction (like narrowing network connections to DBs and texts to HTML or any other specific markup language) just makes it false.
>>> scripting server-side logic for the web
That's closer, but so do tons of other languages.
>>> The internet? The programming community?
See, I just talked to the internet and she says she never told you that.
>>> it's a pretty popular sentiment
Among your friends? I certainly can believe that.
>>> as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste
Absolutely no problem with taste. The problem comes when somebody tries to declare his taste to be an objective truth.
The process involving the tool which lacks this qualities is more prone to human errors.
Also a bit of emotional attachment to the things you do everyday is good for your mental health. The lack of it is a sign you should change your job or even occupation.
Of course there is. You could, for example, survey developers who had experience with both and ask them. If you wanted to be more scientific, you could randomly select a group of freshman computer students, randomly assign half to a ruby group and half to a php group. Teach the ruby group ruby for year 1 and php for year 2, and vice versa for the php group. Then survey everyone. The point is you are trying to make this into an amorphous philosophical issue, when in fact it's a practical question that does have an answer.
This is not scientific, but it is a personal observation: Most (not all, but most) of the developers I've met who make the arguments you are making and defend php as "just as good as any other language" and dismiss its detractors as hipster bandwagon followers don't actually have that much experience working with a language like python or ruby. It's rare to find people with lots of experience in both php and ruby/python who prefer php. Again, that's not "proof," but it's what I've observed personally.
So objective measure is which language is preferred by more people? I'm not sure how it is an objective measure but I'm pretty sure PHP would win on that.
>>> If you wanted to be more scientific, you could
Nobody even did that. I still encounter a lot of people speaking as if they personally did.
>>> don't actually have that much experience working with a language like python or ruby
That's meaningless argument because it can not be disproven by any possible means - for each counterexample I provide of people that know a lot of languages and still think PHP is ok you'd say "well, and I know hundred PHP developers who don't know any other language". Maybe you do, maybe you don't - how anybody could consider that an objective measure of anything or a measure of anything except the characteristic of people you are surrounding yourself with?
>>> It's rare to find people with lots of experience in both php and ruby/python who prefer php.
What is rare? I know a number of people who could work very well in any common language, but that means nothing - I could also write "I know hundreds of people that know all languages in the world and prefer PHP". Your personal acquaintances don't like PHP, so what? My personal acquaintances don't speak Mandarin. Does it mean nobody speaks Mandarin or Mandarin is a failed language? It just says something about me, not about Mandarin.