Anyone here a Ruby developer?

[J.P.]

Is anyone here a Ruby developer? I'm interested in your opinions, some pros and cons, advantages/disadvantages, speed, whatever. I guess Ruby on Rails is the way to go for web development, right?

[Babaganoosh]

Unless you already know Ruby then I wouldn't bother learning it. I looked at Ruby on Rails and Python with Django last year. Python made more sense to me and I know a couple of the guys that created Django so I took the time to learn Python, then started using Django. I'd consider myself proficient with Django now but I still find myself doing almost everything in CakePHP.

Rails and Django are both buzzwords. Nothing more. I feel like I wasted 6 months immersing myself in Python. I'd suggest using PHP with CakePHP or Code Igniter. You'll get most of the benefits of another language/framework and you won't need to learn another language (assuming you already know PHP).

[jay23]

Does PHP has any good object / relational mappers ? RonR biggest selling point is the data base OR part

[d-null]

[Babaganoosh]

Originally Posted by jay23

Does PHP has any good object / relational mappers ? RonR biggest selling point is the data base OR part

Doctrine, but I really haven't screwed with it much. It doesn't integrate with CakePHP (which I use a lot). It works well with codeigniter though.

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Using_Do...h_Code_Igniter

[J.P.]

Well, I'm developing for web with PHP for more than 10 years now. I'm just looking to learn a new language, for fun at first, later for serious work maybe

I've already gone through some documentation and Ruby syntax does not look complicated at all, I think it's pretty straightforward and I don't think I'd have much problems learning it. So this whole "learning a new language" is not a "con" for me.

[Babaganoosh]

Originally Posted by J.P.

Well, I'm developing for web with PHP for more than 10 years now. I'm just looking to learn a new language, for fun at first, later for serious work maybe

I've already gone through some documentation and Ruby syntax does not look complicated at all, I think it's pretty straightforward and I don't think I'd have much problems learning it. So this whole "learning a new language" is not a "con" for me.

That's the way I look at it. I love Python. Django is fun but when I am working I want to be quick. Check out Python. I started with Perl and C so Python made more sense to me. I hear a lot of PHP guys say Ruby makes more sense to them. Ruby was tough for me so I quit screwing with it.

[J.P.]

Well, I already ordered some books on Ruby, let's see where this takes me

A lot of my friends that are programmers love Python too, one of them went from being exclusively PHP to being exclusively Python a few years back, but I don't know, at a first sight Ruby syntax makes more sense to me That whole indentation being a part of the syntax sounds really strange to me. Not that I normally don't indent my code, but still

[Young]

I love Ruby...particularly the Rails framework. When deciding to learn a new language it was between Ruby and Python. The whole spacing thing in Python was the deal breaker.

[AdultSoftwareSolutions]

I spent a few months learning Ruby on Rails. It's a really nice environment to work in. It's so much easier and faster to write code in. The hard part is when you want to deploy it. The code is not as portable to other servers without being a sysadmin. Learning curve is a bit steep on it. There's a lot of magic going on behind the scenes that you really have to know your stuff or it doesn't make any sense. I didn't really like the whole ActiveRecord model. It felt like it added a layer of complexity over the SQL when you wanted to do anything complex. Simple stuff it works great for, but anything more complex and it is a pain.

The best language I have used is Clojure. It is Lisp on the Java Virtual Machine so it has all the power of Lisp and all the API of Java. Ultimately though, I need to write code that I can easily deploy on servers for people and I can't be asking them to set up these complex environments. Plus, when I hire people in the future to work on code it is much easier to find PHP coders than anything else.

I made the decision to stick with PHP, even though it is one of the worst languages I have ever come across. It's a pain to develop in but the documentation is excellent and I have been using it for so long I know the API fairly well.

Before you guys flame me for bashing your beloved PHP, know that I have been programming for over 20 years, written code in over a dozen (probably closer to 2 dozen), and created several of my own languages complete with compilers and virtual machines for them.

[jay23]

If you like Lisp look at F#, i have been playing with it for few months.

[NaughtyRob]

"Ruby on Rails" lol