/me closes the comments, probably (for the second time)

php5 is the norm now. Stop using anti-php4 arguments.

Also, I’m waiting to see how maintainable ruby code turns out to be. Let’s see what people are saying in a few years after code has passed hands a few times. My guess is because most ruby code will be rails, it won’t be the mess a lot of noob php code is. Still, you can’t fault php for that. I was writing MVC php years before rails existed. Rails did not invent MVC, it just brought that style to a new level of notice.

Modifying classes on the fly sounds like a horrible thing for code maintainability to me. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by that, but the whole point of OOP is to provide a certain amount of constraint for the sake of organization.

Constraint & organization & maintainability vs performance & flexibility. I find a lot of the anti-php arguments say php fails at all of the above, when actually it has all of the above.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=ruby

ruby is slower everywhere but startup (which doesn’t matter in a web environment). These benchmarks don’t even take into account the MAJOR improvements you get when you run an opcode cache such as APC or eaccelerator.

Try developing something lick flickr in ruby. Your hardware costs will be through the roof. Yeah they could have written flickr in python rather than php. If the python community were half as vocal as the rails zealots, I’d be much less annoyed. At least python performs, which is why I use it rather than ruby for non web related tasks such as cmd line tools…

“In COBOL I can put a value in a variable and it stays put. But in C I may have to access a value through a pointer. So if I dereference the pointer and find a value I don’t expect, I don’t just go looking for code that wrote to a variable, I also have to worry about checking for code that might have written to the pointer and pointed it at the different value. Imagine the possibilities with multiple indirection. I really don’t see how you can possibly debug with the ground shifting under your feet like this. Interesting though it may be, perhaps C is better reserved for experts…”

While bullets are flying over that, I’d like to point out that enthusiasm for Aspect Oriented Programming implicitly accepts tinkering with class definition after-the-fact. If there are any AO programmers out there, I like to pose the question:

“Is the Ruby/ROR acts_as_… capability just another way to smuggle in AOP? If so, is it cleaner than the AO bytecode injection implementation that seems so invasive to me?”