Installing Ruby on Rails in Linux

>As imperfect as it is, PHP still rules the world. It's gonna be a long, long, long, long, long time before that changes.

Hardly. There's still plenty of perl out there, note to mention python and java and .Net. PHP is very popular for sure, but there's room for Ruby.

As an aside... When it comes to job hunting, RoR seems to be a very good thing. There may be more PHP openings, but demand v. supply is much more favorable in Rails country.

> The prettiest language out there, and the one which is the one brings me the most joy, is the one that is prints the checks that get deposited into my bank account.

So your a closet Cobol lover then. :)

penguinist --

Have you tried passenger (aka mod_rails)? It wasn't around back when I was Rails-ing, but looks like it could solve the mod_ruby problem.

... off reading the modrails.com site ...

Ok, I see that I jumped to a conclusion. Sander mentioned passenger, but on reading his blog it looked like fastcgi/mod_fcgi which is what I have been using. But, I see now that passenger is something new, taking the fastcgi approach but fixing some of the problems along the way. Looks like I have some homework to do... Thanks dinotrac and Sander for the tip.

So the consensus is that PHP is the Windows of interpreted languages: kludgy spaghetti, insecure, nasty in a thousand and one different ways, and yet, and inexplicably, overwhelmingly popular. Because it takes what, thirty minutes to learn some PHP basics, and 60 minutes to learn Ruby, Perl, or Python basics?

/me despairs of humanity. Again.

@TC: I resent that statement. PHP can be a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled developer. PHP isn't kludgy, insecure spaghetti, but an unskilled developer can write that way. But it's also possible to write bad code in Perl, Python and even Ruby.

If PHP has one problem then it is that there are too many people who know too little about it. There are millions of people that know PHP but most are not skilled developers.

Quoting:but an unskilled developer can write that way

And how many PHP developers are (un)skilled?

I'd say that a language should not make it easy to do stupid things. Especially a language that is supposed to be used by "the masses".

Quoting:I'd say that a language should not make it easy to do stupid things.

Then we would never have had C or C++ :-)

>PHP isn't kludgy, insecure spaghetti, but an unskilled developer can write that way.

I do find it remarkable, however, that so much of the PHP code I've seen is nasty, ugly stuff. You're right, of course, that it's wrong to blame the language for the developers it attracts. I have no doubt that Visual Basic could be written in truly elegant ways, but...

There is another problem, however, and I think it's worse than the application developers using it. PHP itself -- the language -- has not been developed in a best practices way.

It can be very entertaining to discover exactly which versions of PHP will or will not work with a PHP application. Wish I could remember how much time I wasted trying to get Joomla 1.5 to work properly only to discover that I had the one and only version of PHP 5 that wouldn't work with it. Sigh.

And... I seem to recall a spell there when PHP developers were very happily churning out bugs for the platform. I could be wrong, though. Old and all that, you know.

Quoting:I do find it remarkable, however, that so much of the PHP code I've seen is nasty, ugly stuff.

Don't ever look at the inside of SugarCRM then. It's even worse than the old PHP-Nuke. But there is quite some beautiful and well-written PHP code out there. PEAR hosts quite a few great libraries. The OpenID library is beautiful. And what do you think of my code? http://svn.jejik.com/viewvc.cgi/webkit/

Quoting:PHP itself -- the language -- has not been developed in a best practices way.

True, but it's also true for many other languages. Perl has some nasty stuff (especially concerning objects). Python is haunted by deprecated libraries once part of the standard. Even C's standard library has so many problems that people grab either Boost or glibc by default.

PHP is definitely getting better though. There is some nice stuff coming in PHP6. I just hope that at some point they break backwards compatibility on some of the more inconsistent functions (is it needle-array or array-needle on a search function?). It would also be nice if they dropped error_reporting all together and switched to exceptions only, like Pyton.

PHP runs LXer, which is kludgy spaghetti, insecure, nasty in a thousand and one different ways, and yet understandably, overwhelmingly popular.

Quoting:So your a closet Cobol lover then. :)

No, PL/1...but then I found Perl, though neither print my checks.

Quoting:Even C's standard library has so many problems that people grab either Boost or glibc by default.

As I see it, C was a language designed when we were still learning; PHP is a demonstration that we haven't learned much ;)

Hehehe :-)

> No, PL/1...but then I found Perl, though neither print my checks.

If your checks go through multiple financial institutions, then there's almost certainly a Cobol program involved in there somewhere. But in your specific case, there may not be.

And we got through all of this without anybody mentioning that Java is the new Cobol.

Are we slipping?

java? I recently read that Perl is in danger of becoming the next Cobol: http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38010

Note on that article: The TIOBE numbers are total cow manure, but read the comments to find out why Perl is becoming the next Cobol.

Sander -

Nah.

That just shows perl is slipping away to almost die, kept alive only by its utility.

Java is the real COBOL as evidenced by it's place at the top of the list and heavy enterprise use.

It fails the COBOL comparison in that COBOL could generate very efficient code when written by good programmers, whereas Java is, ahem, java.

The flip side is of course that Java is still being used to implement many new and big projects, whereas Perl.... not so.

>The flip side is of course that Java is still being used to implement many new and big projects

Yup...for now.

it is very difficult to do a small J2EE project in the corporate world.