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Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

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11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#11
post #8
post #6

Am considering Ruby at the moment. But reminded of Twitter dropping Ruby due to certain reliability issues. Hence having second thoughts. Or am I a little ahead of myself here worrying about something that may never affect me?

Yes, you are.

Sense-check succeeded.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#12
post #3

The one you are more comfortable in developing. Choice of framework is more important. If you are good in PHP choose a framework like codeigniter or symfony. If you are good in Ruby choose a framework like Rails. I have developed in all php, ruby, python and my personal favorite is Python/Django or Python/Flask. If you want to use any 3rd party api e.g., Facebook API make sure it has official SDK for language you cho…

Could not agree more, I used to hate frameworks but after experiencing codeigniter I can definitely see the benefits now, faster development, less complicated code and a structured site architecture.

Though, the crypto packages on CI could definitely use an upgrade.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#13
post #6

Am considering Ruby at the moment. But reminded of Twitter dropping Ruby due to certain reliability issues. Hence having second thoughts. Or am I a little ahead of myself here worrying about something that may never affect me?

Hmm... Do you have plans of building something at Twitter scale? If you can foresee that, then I guess you are right when you are considering Twitter's case of dropping Ruby.

I am no Ruby-ist but I am sure Ruby is not that bad that you will have troubles scaling. You just have to understand how to scale and you can use either PHP or Ruby to apply the general concepts of scalability.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#14
If you are considering PHP, do explore Yii framework. I haven't used Yii myself but I have heard a lot about its goodness as compared to other PHP frameworks.

If Ruby, RoR should be the first choice I guess. You may also want to consider Sinatra.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#15
However if you are looking to recruit coders for the project first you need to find a good (PHP / Ruby) coder and then let them help you with the recruiting. If your skills in either PHP or Ruby are not up to snuff then you are likely to make some serious recruiting mistakes.

Also I would recommend that you take a serious look at python. My personal preferences puts java at the bottom of the list and PHP above that but below python and ruby (I'm a ROR developer by the way).

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#16
I would suggest Rails if you want ruby and definitely consider Laravel as a php framework. I am quiet loving the framework, though am bootstrapping one of my web apps on laravel and majority of my works are in Rails ...

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#17
post #5

Scalability doesn't have anything to do with the programming language but rather with the architecture. The same goes for performance unless you're talking about pure number-crunching. The ease of development depends on your experience with either toolset. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but by asking this question you sound like you aren't a programmer but rather somebody that wants to go to rent-a-coder and have so…

Yeah, if this kind of questions asked on stackoverflow, the topic will be closed by the admins. Nevertheless, there are pros and cons for every programming and scripting language but yeah scalability has got to do with your architecture of your application.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#18
This is a question I've been dealing with myself for some time. I've alot of professional experience with PHP but have done some work in Ruby (on Rails) too. I'm looking to build a decent size site and in the end have opted for PHP for the following reasons:

- familiarity with the language - wide support and hosted everywhere - not restricted by Rails 'norms' - easier to get up and running on a live server, even if it's your own virtual box - proven scalability - personally not mad on ActiveRecord (Rails way of interacting with DB). Would rather have greater control over my DB interactions, which I know is possible in Rails but it's very non-standard

Ruby IMHO is a far superior language to PHP, but you will have to learn a framework to get it up and running on the web, whether it's Rails, Sinatra or something else. Same with Python. PHP doesn't require a framework, although plenty exist, so it'll be easier to get an initial prototype up and running.

Re: Ask HN: PHP or Ruby?

#20
These threads really will get you nowhere. There are countless discussions like this all over the internet and in every one of them you'll find people stating one or the other choice. You need to try it for yourself.
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