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Rasmus Lerdorf is jealous of Rails

September 14, 2009

In reference to the comments Rasmus Lerdorf made here:

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/how-php-became-such-a-huge-success-633591

> RL: I think [Ruby on] Rails has tapered out a little bit lately.

No, not at all. The Rails core team has grown quite a bit since the Merb team joined up. We just got the Rails 2.3.4 release a couple weeks ago.

> RL: Maybe the new version that they're coming out with – the one that's actually fast (laughs)

I deploy my Rails apps using mod_rails, and it's very fast. Clearly you're not using it if you think Rails is slow.

> RL: there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff

Real sites don't use scaffolding. Scaffolding is something you use in a coffee shop when chatting with a client. Later you go back and actually write the code for the site. Obviously you have little experience with Rails, otherwise you'd know not to try to use scaffolding on a production site.

> RL: But I've never been a huge fan of code generation

That's painfully obvious since no one has ever even come close to building something as powerful as Rails in PHP. Ever heard of meta-programming? Didn't think so.

> RL: Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.

Yeah, the same thing happened to me in 1996 when I began using PHP and began to distance myself and my new web development away from Perl. But it's no problem since PHP coders are coming over to Rails in droves. Don't believe me? Check the daily traffic on the Rails list, and then compare it to the ZF list.

> RL: But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'

Yeah, the same can be said for any PHP framework. Having to know the language a framework is built in to use it well isn't any fault of Rails.

Tags: php, ruby, zend, rails

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