[SATLUG] IO-InfoOnly: PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast

[Justizin]

On 12/5/06, Nate Turnage <pixelnate at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/27/06, R. Tyler Ballance <tyler at bleepsoft.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt, PHP was
> > initially publicly released in 1995, Ruby on Rails was initially
> > publicly released in 2004.
>
>
>
> Ruby was also released in 1995 (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_language#History ), and Rails was released
> as v.1 on Dec. 13, 2005 (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_On_Rails#History). While it is Rails
> that has made Ruby so popular, Ruby has existed about
> as long as PHP.
>

Ruby's initial popularity was stymied by Python - it's good to keep
this in mind.  Ruby was something that Python programmers talked about
learning if they ever got some free time, for the most part.

Of course, Rails or no Rails, there is a great deal more use of Python
than Ruby.  I believe Python recently replaced Scheme or somesuch as
MIT's official robotics language, for one, and there seems to be a
great deal more research going on with Python as a base:

  * http://ironpython.org/ (Microsoft hired a Python developer to tune
their dynamic language runtime)

  * http://pypy.codespeak.net/ (A version of Python, written in
Python, which can generate itself in a number of languages.)

SLOC is a very bad measure, though.  I found out recently that Plone,
with all of its' 50+ language translations and supporting frameworks,
if you include all of Zope2 and Zope3, stretches toward 5 Million
SLOC.

The truth is, we'd like to cut that in ten and keep one piece, I'm
pretty sure.  Code is not an asset, it's a liability.

-- 
Justizin, Independent Interactivity Architect
ACM SIGGRAPH SysMgr, Reporter
http://www.siggraph.org/