However when every day I see such alarmist muck being put out for the world to see, Ii can understand why the rails community respond in the way they do.

Rails is not PHP or Java, it is newer and therefore more vulnerable to losing marketshare over spewed garbage, so we react. While a large group of the rails community seems to be quite young and therefore do not have the social skills to sound like anything but WOW players, there are quite a few of us with tact as well.

It is just more fun to read the l2p (learn to program) comments :)

I mostly use Ruby on Rails to develop my employers web applications, not because “I got religion”, but because I’ve found myself most productive using that framework. Is that going to be true for everyone? Obviously not. It’s true for me, and that’s enough. I don’t lay away at night, tossing and turning because someone else finds themselves more productive in PHP or Python or whatever. Meh.

I’m a pragmatist, and I’ve wound up in my career doing work using PHP, J2EE and .NET. I’m a developer, not a Rails developer, and I’ll use the tool that best suits the needs of the moment. Today, Rails is my preferred tool for most cases. Yesterday, it was J2EE. Tomorrow, it could be something else.

It’s also worth noting that the raging dog-pile that the comments to the original blog post is actively harmful. For example, a poster named Bob made a comment about ActiveRecord that showed his lack of understanding. He’d probably benefit from looking into :include, :join and :conditions, but the childish battle raging in that thread makes discussing things like this impossible.

And so the war continues …

The argument that you can’t compare them comes from the discussion of which is better _in general_. But we’re talking about tools for a specific case here. And PHP and Rails are both tools.

This is like the saying “You can’t compare apples to oranges,” which is clearly wrong. For example: “Which one has a more bumpy surface?” Sometimes it’s amazing that some people can forget that the truth of an answer depends on the question.

-phaylon
(neither Ruby nor PHP dev)

Thanks a lot for your comment. I couldn’t have done it better!

Regards
Olivier

First, remember, that “very poor project management” involves a core developer of Rails itself.

Secondly, I’m sure everyone here is fully aware that Rails is *yet another magic-bullet framework* and PHP is a language. However, in this case, it doesn’t matter that he compares the two. His two choices in this case were Rails on Ruby (Ruby on Rails is so backwards) and PHP. He went with PHP. You might proclaim loudly that they are completely different and cannot be compared, and yet, he just did.

Thirdly, while I lament that he didn’t get into more detail about what he was trying to do, would it make a difference if he spelled it out for you? Here is what you need to know. A core Rails developer (someone I’m going to trust more than most others with knowing how Rails works) was working on the project. CDBaby is a website. It works a certain way, and at the time, it was, in fact, working just fine. It was ugly, but it was working (and I’d take working over clean design any day of the week). Also, he made it clear that his intent was to simply do the switch, and he didn’t want to do incremental changes. This partly hindered the process (and, I imagine, a limitation of Rails).

Finally, no, the blog post would not have received less flame comment if it was written better. Time and time again, I’ve seen people post why they move from Rails to PHP, or talk about their Rails problems, and the armchair developers come out of the woodworks with seemingly simple solutions (just add more hardware, that’s a database problem, or Rails is just a framework) that aren’t really simple and don’t really solve the problem.

Rails is opinionated by design. While some people might share this opinion, it’s not the only opinion on the block, and a lot of smart people don’t agree with that opinion, and when they disagree, the Rails horde jumps in and lashes out with, well, useless arguments. Rail’s can’t solve all the problems! Rails can’t solve most of the problems. It can solve the problems it was designed for: websites for people that think a certain way and only a certain way.