Let me begin with a couple of sentences about my background. My major is not CS, it’s business, my profession is online marketing, and I write code because I enjoy doing it. It helps me to think straight, so besides being fun it is also kind of a mental exercise. Of course it makes my life as online marketer way easier at the same time, because I really understand what’s going on behind the curtain, which has three major advantages:
- I know what is possible, so I can came up with a good strategy for each individual case
- I know how it is done, and sometimes it is just quicker to do it by myself than explaining somebody else what to do
- When talking to a client I don’t need to throw buzz words at them like “URL architecture” and such, I am able to explain what’s going on and why
So, until one and a half years ago I wrote all my scripts in PHP and it allowed me to accomplish anything I wanted to accomplish. Then I learned about Ruby on Rails. A lot of people I was dealing with believed that Rails will revolutionize the web, I didn’t, I thought it is nothing but a hype, but as my major is not CS I thought I might be wrong so I started to learn Rails.
In the last couple of weeks I found more and more articles where people talked about the decreasing hype of Rails, the one by Matthew Mullenweg was the first one I stumbled upon. Matt is referring to 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails by Derk Silvers. check out his reason number 7: “programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better” - I think this is so true, Rails kind of forces you to become a better programmer… but: you can also be a good programmer when you write your code in PHP - it’s up to you.
Regarding the believe that it is Rails that will revolutionize the web, I agree with Rami when he states that the language is irrelevant, and Matt: “Through it all, I still haven’t heard of a start-up or web service that failed or succeeded due solely to its web framework or language”. Here is another hilarious post about the fall of Rails, written by Rob Connery. Read the part where he is talking about the problems Twitter currently has, he says: “looks like Twitter is riding Rails right off a cliff”. Rob concludes his post with: “I think Rails will fade unless they get this one thing straight: It’s about you”.
And the customer? The customer simply doesn’t care about the technology, all the customer cares about is to get a working product.
I don’t want to be anal, but I’ll say it anyways: I knew it from the beginning, and it feels good to be right.
As soon as I have a little more time I’ll check out CakePHP and ZEND Framework.
