I admire his courage. He just professed affection for the disowned weird cousin of programming languages that everyone forgets to invite to family reunions. I’ve been working with RoR for a nine months now, and I definitely see why there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it. But there’s quite a few issues I have with it that never get noticed in comparisons like this – rather, it seems it’s all just PHP bashing. First, yes you can run a VPS rather than use shared hosting – but you want to be a sysadmin too? Put Postgres on there, whatever other software you need, and up goes the time investment. It doesn’t do it itself. Second, Ruby’s community is tight, but it’s so fluid it’s hard to find best practices because someone’s always creating the next library du jour for authentication or some such. Third, Heroku is cool, but it’s nothing like either shared hosting or a VPS. No static file uploading so you need to use S3 buckets for some content – so if you’re deploying several client sites to Heroku using the same codebase, how do you generate or handle separate buckets? Under just one account? And Python has a lot of benefits too, but the transition to 3 complicates things – which libraries are compatible, which aren’t? Frankly, if you want to get some idea on the web for rapid iteration, and you aren’t already a RoR or Python guy, it’s almost premature optimization to go that way because it’ll take you so long to get up to speed on the massive paradigm shift to take advantage of those languages/platforms. PHP works, it has most of the libraries you’ll need built in, and hosting/deployment is well-established and straightforward. I’m at the point where I almost feel I need to stop reading most blogs because I’ll stop feeling like I’m behind the times and missing some panacea that will bite me later. Just my quick 2 cents.
