OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

Hi Group,

This may seem a odd question in a PHP group, but I think this might be a
good place to ask since I am mainly a PHP coder these days that maybe
starts with Ruby.

Situation:
A client of a friend of mine asked me to take over a project done in
Ruby. (The original programmer appearantly behaved like an @ss and his
client wants to get rid of him.)
The project is done in Ruby on Rails.


I have 0 experience with Ruby, but consider myself a reasonably seasoned
programmer (php/java/vb/basic perl/javascript).

Does anybody know how much time I should expect to spend to get 'on
rail' with Ruby (Ruby on Rails)?
The language claims to be easy and intuitive and even fun. :P
(But do you know of a language that says of itself to be hard,
counterintuitive and absolutely NO fun?)

How does Ruby compare to PHP?
What do you think of Ruby and Ruby on Rails?
I don't need links to wikepedia or ruby homepage or something like that.
Found them myself. ;-)
I hope for opinions from PHP programmers on Ruby.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Regards,
Erwin Moller

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

> Situation:
> A client of a friend of mine asked me to take over a project done in
> Ruby. (The original programmer appearantly behaved like an @ss and his
> client wants to get rid of him.)
> The project is done in Ruby on Rails.
>
>
> I have 0 experience with Ruby, but consider myself a reasonably seasoned
> programmer (php/java/vb/basic perl/javascript).

I have zero experience in Ruby on Rails as well, but I have had a few
introductions. Ruby is an object oriented language, so if you use object
orientation in your other languages, this will be familiar. Just the
mixins are different. But not rocket-science-difficult as far as I know.

If you have experience with unit testing, Ruby on Rails will be an
enlightenment. If you don't like unit tests, prepare for a hard time.
The Ruby on Rails system is designed to guide you to "good programming".
You may have to learn to love it...

> Does anybody know how much time I should expect to spend to get 'on
> rail' with Ruby (Ruby on Rails)?
> The language claims to be easy and intuitive and even fun. :P
> (But do you know of a language that says of itself to be hard,
> counterintuitive and absolutely NO fun?)

Apart from BrainF*ck (see http://bluesorcerer.net/esoteric/bf.html) and
intercal (see http://catb.org/~esr/intercal/), I would not know of any...

> How does Ruby compare to PHP?

As Apple to PEAR probably ;) No. Just kidding. Ruby is quite legible and
"purely" object oriented. You should be able to read it.

> What do you think of Ruby and Ruby on Rails?

If I would need it for my job, I would not object to learning it. I have
never had the need though. But enough of my friends use it.

Good luck,
--
Willem Bogaerts

Application smith
Kratz B.V.
http://www.kratz.nl/

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

Erwin Moller
wrote in
news:46d555d0$0$241$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl:


> How does Ruby compare to PHP?
> What do you think of Ruby and Ruby on Rails?
> I don't need links to wikepedia or ruby homepage or something like
that.
> Found them myself. ;-)
> I hope for opinions from PHP programmers on Ruby.

I don't have much experience with Ruby either, but from what I've read,
it doesn't scale very well at all. PHP is apparantly far superior in
that regard - I've read comments on the web that indicate some people
have junked their Ruby projects and recoded them in PHP for the scaling
issue alone.

One thing about Ruby I've noticed is that its followers are pretty rabid
about it, and generally don't like to hear bad things about it.

I personally love PHP, it does absolutely everything I need it to do (at
the moment), it's fast, has many years of experience and development
behind it, and is almost universally available on web servers. That
being said, I am freely able to handle disparaging comments about its
shortcomings, which I am well aware of.

I wouldn't learn Ruby unless a new job (ie: career, not project)
required it. There are certain languages/apps I'm not prepared to do a
'adequate' performance with; I'd rather get paid 'expert' style money
for my PHP skills than average pay for 'servicable' Ruby skills. Much in
the same way that I just stopped trying to keep up with
actionscript,asp, etc... I'd rather be an expert in a couple languages
than a jack-of-all-trades.

Ruby will be good for getting you to standardize your coding I suppose,
but if you're after speed, scalability and a ton of support/development
history, then PHP is where it's at.


ps: I am not interested in a flame-war!

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

On 29 aug, 18:48, Good Man wrote:
> Erwin Moller
> wrote innews:46d555d0$0$241$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl:
>
>
>
> > How does Ruby compare to PHP?
> > What do you think of Ruby and Ruby onRails?
> > I don't need links to wikepedia or ruby homepage or something like
> that.
> > Found them myself. ;-)
> > I hope for opinions from PHP programmers on Ruby.
>
> I don't have much experience with Ruby either, but from what I've read,
> it doesn't scale very well at all. PHP is apparantly far superior in
> that regard - I've read comments on the web that indicate some people
> have junked their Ruby projects and recoded them in PHP for the scaling
> issue alone.
>
> One thing about Ruby I've noticed is that its followers are pretty rabid
> about it, and generally don't like to hear bad things about it.
>
> I personally love PHP, it does absolutely everything I need it to do (at
> the moment), it's fast, has many years of experience and development
> behind it, and is almost universally available on web servers. That
> being said, I am freely able to handle disparaging comments about its
> shortcomings, which I am well aware of.
>
> I wouldn't learn Ruby unless a new job (ie: career, not project)
> required it. There are certain languages/apps I'm not prepared to do a
> 'adequate' performance with; I'd rather get paid 'expert' style money
> for my PHP skills than average pay for 'servicable' Ruby skills. Much in
> the same way that I just stopped trying to keep up with
> actionscript,asp, etc... I'd rather be an expert in a couple languages
> than a jack-of-all-trades.
>
> Ruby will be good for getting you to standardize your coding I suppose,
> but if you're after speed, scalability and a ton of support/development
> history, then PHP is where it's at.
>
> ps: I am not interested in a flame-war!

I have been a PHP programmer switching to Rails and must admit I
needed some time to adjust. You are forced in a MVC structure that can
feel strange in the beginning. Rails is now all about restful design.
I think this simplifies things and I greatly suggets it when learning
RoR.

Ruby code is very easy to learn (is the Rails part that can take some
time). I now greatly prefer Ruby over PHP especially for readability.
Especialy all the $blable->$dqsd->$gdsq make your PHP code ugly I
think.

regards,
STijn

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

On Aug 29, 4:16 pm, Erwin Moller
wrote:
> This may seem a odd question in a PHP group, but I think this might be a
> good place to ask since I am mainly a PHP coder these days that maybe
> starts with Ruby.


I was forced to start RoR and I learned it. The idea is impressive.
The main idea is to cut short the development time; if you have
already invested your time on optimization and other code speedup
study, you'll start wondering about performance. And, finally Ruby is
slow and agreed. Also, RoR is also slow (execution speed) comparing
with normal programming. But, they're marketing by it's development
time. After reading RoR and tried it little (Ruby is Perl and Python),
I was wondering why this can't be done in PHP (Ruby guys swear that it
can't be done in PHP). Yes, we have couple of RoR alternatives. I got
settled in CakePHP as the time I have spent on RoR is easy to adopt
the CakePHP (the docs on CakePHP is very limited; but switching from
RoR to CakePHP is easy). Still it's slow (in terms of execution
speed), but the development is faster for Web 2.0/digg like sites.

I was told that RoR and it's other clones can be effectively used
to create prototype sites. If the site drives traffic and dollars,
another set of time and dollars can be invested to rewrite from
scratch using normal programming. IOW, you got and idea, you quickly
create the site, if the world is impressed with the idea, you can then
rewrite using normal programming.

--

Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com Blog: http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

> Also, RoR is also slow (execution speed) comparing
> with normal programming. But, they're marketing by it's development
> time.

Wow, what a marketing concept - your apps will suck, but you can create
them really, really fast.

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

On Sep 4, 11:16 am, Sanders Kaufman wrote:
>
> Wow, what a marketing concept - your apps will suck, but you can
> create them really, really fast.

Worked for Microsoft though, didn't it? :)

Cheers,
NC

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

NC wrote:
>
> Worked for Microsoft though, didn't it? :)

Micro-who?
Are they the folks who make that ridiculously complex, overpriced, IBM
knock-off?

I'm a Linux newbie.
I never heard of no Micro$oft.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. ;)

.... and I never ever voted Republican, either.

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:16:08 +0200, Sanders Kaufman
wrote:

> R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:
>
>> Also, RoR is also slow (execution speed) comparing
>> with normal programming. But, they're marketing by it's development
>> time.
>
> Wow, what a marketing concept - your apps will suck, but you can create
> them really, really fast.

You've got a point, however: most sites will not have very heavy traffic.
A descent amount of sites I work on will have < 1000 visitors a day. A
little more resource use for less investment/time could very well be a
very justifiable, conscious descision.

--
Rik Wasmus

Re: OTish: Ruby learningcurve for PHP programmer?

Rik Wasmus wrote:

> You've got a point, however: most sites will not have very heavy
> traffic. A descent amount of sites I work on will have < 1000 visitors a
> day. A little more resource use for less investment/time could very well
> be a very justifiable, conscious descision.

Yeah - even a mutt has someone who loves him. :)