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Sorry to respond twice to your post, but I realized this was a great opportunity to learn something. Given my basic example in my post, what language would you

by chez17 14y ago

Sorry to respond twice to your post, but I realized this was a great opportunity to learn something. Given my basic example in my post, what language would you recommend I try to accomplish this task? I like to stay away from frameworks so basically I'm asking you to not suggest Rails, however don't be afraid to suggest ruby. If you feel like typing something out, let me know why you suggest it and what advantages it has over PHP.

j_baker 14y ago
Just try something. I don't doubt that PHP has its good points, but how can you appreciate them without having something to measure them against? Ruby or Python would probably be the best choices if you don't have anything else in mind.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Ruby. It's the cleanest language with the most sensible standard library I've come across to date. Ruby doesn't necessarily mean Rails, and in fact I'm not a fan of Rails' overly prescriptive paradigm. (As an aside, any time you hear Rails is an MVC framework, discount it because it's really an MVA framework.) One of the things you'll find coming from the world of PHP is Ruby has consistent method signatures. For this and a lot of other reasons you'll almost certainly be happier with Ruby. Aside from happiness, there are things that make Ruby more powerful. For example, you can cleanly implement the reactor pattern (think: NodeJS) with EventMachine and with EM-Synchrony you can avoid the callback hell that comes with NodeJS. If you want, you can look at Sinatra to provide the common functionality that the PHP framework provides. With Sinatra you're not all-but-forced to use an ORM like you are with Rails, as Sinatra doesn't include one. If you really want, you can go closer to the metal and look directly at Rack, which is middleware between web servers (Apache, Nginx, etc) and the actual application. There's really no right way to do it, but the best thing is to learn and explore. Some people will recommend Python, and while it's a decent language, it's got some things I consider to be rough edges -- lack of useful language features, such as switch/case statements, and badly implemented parts of its standard library that handle network requests. The next language on my learning list is Go. I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I'll reserve my judgment until I have some experience with it.
- chez17 14y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to write this. You have sufficiently peaked my interest. My next personal project will be done in Ruby.
  - kintamanimatt 14y ago
    Good luck! One of the best books I found for Ruby was The Well Grounded Rubyist by Manning Publications. Also, s/peaked/piqued ;-)
  - dxbydt 14y ago
    >My next personal project will be done in Ruby. Here's a better idea. Take a very simple problem - say user fubar enters his name, you say "Welcome, fubar!", populate a backend database with his name because he's a new user. Otherwise you tell him "Welcome back, fubar!" and don't mess with your database. This involves what ? Handling a GET, making a database insert, doing a select on name in a database, that's it. Now go do this in atleast 5 frameworks, and time yourself. PHP obviously, but do try RoR, Django, Play2, JSP and ASP.NET I actually did the above exercise and came away with a lot of valuable insight. In my case Play2 was a breeze because on Heroku its trivial to set up, and each GET xxx request mapped directly to a xxx scala method in the Controller, so no magic. The others were a little more painful, but not a whole lot. I enjoyed the exercise.
    - kintamanimatt 14y ago
      The only trouble with this is that trivial applications tend to only give a superficial feel for the framework and aren't representative of a "real" development experience. For example, I wrote a trivial application in Flask. Python's Flask, while it looks great on the surface and has fantastic documentation, rapidly becomes unwieldy in the face of more complex problems. The same is true for Ruby on Rails. Most frameworks almost feel like they're tuned to solve these basic problems and give a fantastic first impression that doesn't sustain. Developing a complete project in each is a better way to move forward IMHO.
- kreek 14y ago

by chez17 14y ago

j_baker 14y ago

Just try something. I don't doubt that PHP has its good points, but how can you appreciate them without having something to measure them against? Ruby or Python would probably be the best choices if you don't have anything else in mind.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

Ruby. It's the cleanest language with the most sensible standard library I've come across to date. Ruby doesn't necessarily mean Rails, and in fact I'm not a fan of Rails' overly prescriptive paradigm. (As an aside, any time you hear Rails is an MVC framework, discount it because it's really an MVA framework.) One of the things you'll find coming from the world of PHP is Ruby has consistent method signatures. For this and a lot of other reasons you'll almost certainly be happier with Ruby. Aside from happiness, there are things that make Ruby more powerful. For example, you can cleanly implement the reactor pattern (think: NodeJS) with EventMachine and with EM-Synchrony you can avoid the callback hell that comes with NodeJS. If you want, you can look at Sinatra to provide the common functionality that the PHP framework provides. With Sinatra you're not all-but-forced to use an ORM like you are with Rails, as Sinatra doesn't include one. If you really want, you can go closer to the metal and look directly at Rack, which is middleware between web servers (Apache, Nginx, etc) and the actual application. There's really no right way to do it, but the best thing is to learn and explore. Some people will recommend Python, and while it's a decent language, it's got some things I consider to be rough edges -- lack of useful language features, such as switch/case statements, and badly implemented parts of its standard library that handle network requests. The next language on my learning list is Go. I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I'll reserve my judgment until I have some experience with it.

chez17 14y ago
Thank you for taking the time to write this. You have sufficiently peaked my interest. My next personal project will be done in Ruby.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  Good luck! One of the best books I found for Ruby was The Well Grounded Rubyist by Manning Publications. Also, s/peaked/piqued ;-)
- dxbydt 14y ago
  >My next personal project will be done in Ruby. Here's a better idea. Take a very simple problem - say user fubar enters his name, you say "Welcome, fubar!", populate a backend database with his name because he's a new user. Otherwise you tell him "Welcome back, fubar!" and don't mess with your database. This involves what ? Handling a GET, making a database insert, doing a select on name in a database, that's it. Now go do this in atleast 5 frameworks, and time yourself. PHP obviously, but do try RoR, Django, Play2, JSP and ASP.NET I actually did the above exercise and came away with a lot of valuable insight. In my case Play2 was a breeze because on Heroku its trivial to set up, and each GET xxx request mapped directly to a xxx scala method in the Controller, so no magic. The others were a little more painful, but not a whole lot. I enjoyed the exercise.
  - kintamanimatt 14y ago
    The only trouble with this is that trivial applications tend to only give a superficial feel for the framework and aren't representative of a "real" development experience. For example, I wrote a trivial application in Flask. Python's Flask, while it looks great on the surface and has fantastic documentation, rapidly becomes unwieldy in the face of more complex problems. The same is true for Ruby on Rails. Most frameworks almost feel like they're tuned to solve these basic problems and give a fantastic first impression that doesn't sustain. Developing a complete project in each is a better way to move forward IMHO.
kreek 14y ago