I swore myself to only post meaningful stuff to this blog, so basically, no rants, ever. But!
The discussion revolving around Twitter and Rails (versus Scala) did remind me of something: If you’ve doing PHP for a while and know people who are programming not in PHP, you probably heard it all before. PHP guys (and girls) are being look down on and mocked by people of other programming and scripting languages. And that is despite …
- … the overall acceptance and distribution of the language
- … the millions of free lines of code in open source projects and other code repositories
- … the countless great examples of PHP in the enterprise
- and the amazingly short time to market when you develop with PHP
Those are a few good things to say about this fine language called PHP. Unfortunately they are never taken into consideration when you bash people who use it.
Instead you tell them about the short comings of several pieces of software such as phpBB, Mambo/Joomla and Wordpress who have had a lot of issues in the past but never the less are more popular than virtually any of their open source counterparts in the other languages.
Now, because a lot of Ruby people have a strong dis-like for PHP, you may think they deserve this. I don’t think they, or Ruby, do.
I am perplexed how Alex Payne handles the current Scala/Ruby shoot out over at Twitter.
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I’m amazed that someone with his experience and knowledge oversees the obvious short comings of several people who worked on the Twitter code base over the past years.
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I’m amazed that he oversees all the crap they implemented.
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I’m amazed that he oversees how they were and still are suffering from the most classic NIH.
And all to blame it on the language — Ruby.
Anyway, there may be plenty to argue about Ruby (or maybe just Rails). But blaming the language because of the inability of a developer (or multiple) is not the way to do it. It just makes you look very ignorant.
I sure hope Scala lives up to Alex’ expectations, but if it doesn’t — just blame it on Scala!