Flutterby™! : So apparently Ruby is the new PHP

So apparently Ruby is the new PHP

2012-09-19 19:01:07.462449+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

So apparently Ruby is the new PHP. Both in quick web apps, and in horrendously bad software development practices.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-21 04:32:18.119253+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

(C++)++ = C? It's a binary digit!

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-20 18:59:20.316028+00 by: Dan Lyke

C is the new C++.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-20 18:33:42.964144+00 by: ebradway

Ruby on Rails's biggest problem is that Apple installed it by default in OS-X starting in 2007. All of a sudden lots of people who weren't capable of installing a web framework were developing web applications.

Ruby on Rails's biggest savior has been the rise of virtualization. Instead of fighting gem versionitis, you can just stand up a separate VM for each application.

And what's the new C++? C#? Objective-C? Scala?

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-20 14:54:59.342567+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, I started looking (again) at Perl6, and realized that for all the wacky syntactic stuff, it was basically a chance to yet again start over with the various modules in an attempt to get them right this time. I also realized yesterday, in taking stock of what software projects are assets and which are liabilities at work, that we have a whole shload of "things where someone thought they could do it better than the umpteen solutions already in play".

Heck, I suffer from some of that with the Flutterby CMS: My own Markdown and HTML parsers.

So, yeah, there's a heck of a lot of stuff that gets rewritten because it doesn't really have the value that people think it does, and because naive people think they can do it better. And sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're not...

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-20 01:03:51.754351+00 by: dexev

I managed to stay away from RoR, but both it and PHP suffered from being pioneers in web development tools. There was cruft and bad decisions, and less experienced users.

My original comment was glib, but as I've started to realize that, as we create new languages, we keep making the same kinds of mistakes.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-19 21:48:34.050189+00 by: Dan Lyke

The particular was a work discussion in which a cow-orker was describing the trials and tribulations of getting a Redmine instance running and co-existing with other RoR apps. The Gem versionitis problems and other horrendousness completely reminded me of the horrors of bad PHP.

And yet there are a bunch of really awesome Ruby on Rails apps out there, just as there are some really spectacular awesome PHP apps. But damn, the back-end is painful.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-09-19 21:04:27.929915+00 by: dexev

Oooh, I love this game!

Python is the new Perl, HTML is the new X11, Java is the new COBOL!