Comments on: I know Kung Fu

By: Ivo's Blog - jansch.nl » Blog Archive » php|tek 2008: day 3 and wrap up

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:44:47 +0000

[...] was nice to hear Terry talk about the ‘kung fu’ experience that most first-time ruby users have. I had that Kung Fu experience once, but while I said back then that I would start to use Ruby, 2 years later I still haven’t. [...]

By: jansch.nl » Blog Archive » PHP in 2007: Serious Business

jansch.nl » Blog Archive » PHP in 2007: Serious Business — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:24:41 +0000

[...] say that Ruby was a big threat to PHP in 2007 (thanks to the Ruby on Rails framework). I have flirted a bit with Ruby myself, and language-wise, it’s much cleaner and consistent. However, selecting a [...]

By: colson

colson — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:33:54 +0000

I too and a PHPer and I’ve picked around with Ruby a bit. I have no practical purpose for really switching at this point other than it would be a nice language to know.

I think with most languages you just carry on with whatever you prefer. Rails offers some nice additions to Ruby and for what Rails is, you can also use cakephp [url]http://www.cakephp.org[/url]. So I think alot of the “this better than that” talk comes down to preference and what makes most sense at the time you need to address a given situation. At first, I was a bandwagon hopper but at the same time, it’s just another language and if I really want something that is “far-out” there, I’ll go with io – even simpler than ruby and still taking more time to wrap my head around.

[url]http://iolanguage.com[/url]

By: Jaen

Jaen — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:27:00 +0000

Thank you for sharing that observation.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:22:10 +0000

If you reread my original comment, you’ll hopefully note that I am adding additional observations beyond what the original article provided.

If you want evidence of maintainability, productivity, and other concerns, then that’s something beyond the scope of this discussion thread. On my own part, I base those conclusions on experience with different language features over my time as a programmer, and I have found it best to categorise them broadly into two sets: 1. appreciation of the art, and 2. business concerns. Sharing that observation was the intent of my original comment.

By: Jaen

Jaen — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:14:53 +0000

(also note that the blog post made no sweeping generalizations like “alternatives provide no productivity, maintainability etc. benefits”, without offering a single shred of evidence)

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:12:36 +0000

Which is why I have been repeatedly mentioning “appreciation of the art”. I believe I was clear about the context of my observations and of “major feature scope” in my first comment.

By: Jaen

Jaen — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:04:03 +0000

(note that the blog post didn’t say absolutely anything about ‘business’, and neither did I)

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:54:47 +0000

PHP provides enough OO for that distinction to be irrelevant in terms of productivity and maintainability. As I said, it’s a difference that changes the appreciation of the art but not the business decision.

By: Jaen

Jaen — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 18:24:06 +0000

PHP is an imperative, mostly procedural language.
Ruby is functional (in philosophy) and object-oriented to the bottom.

That’s quite a fundamental difference. “Same major feature scope?” Assembler and Prolog are in the same major feature scope by that metric