Which should i take, php or ruby on rails?

2 points by dansmog 12y ago ↗ HN

first- we(nigeria) have electricity problem, and besides i dnt have a pc, so i want to learn one of those language so i could churn out websites for clients faster, to be able afford a pc of my own. which one would you advice i go for? btw am at intermidiate at front-end development already. thanks

7 comments

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calcsam 12y ago ↗

Use Ruby on Rails. PHP is dead and dying, especially around here (SF Bay Area).

dansmog 12y ago ↗

thanks, pls can you suggest some awesome site to learning ruby on rails? ebooks- cant buy for now. thank you

calcsam 12y ago ↗

http://bentobox.io/ has links to everything you want and more

jacquesm 12y ago ↗

So because to you in the US PHP is dead and dying (for which I'd really like to see some hard evidence) someone in Nigeria should use RoR?

You're not doing RoR a favor here. If that's the best argument that can be brought to bear. I'd know a few that are a lot stronger than that and I would not have to resort to unsupported stuff.

http://langpop.com/

Has PHP to be about twice as popular as Ruby, and the 3rd most popular language (after C and Java, of which I would consider Java to be a viable alternative and C not really).

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Has them at PHP 3.3 and Ruby 1.2% respectively.

Dead and dying indeed.

geekishmatt 12y ago ↗

Don't use Ruby/RoR and stay with PHP. PHP has got a large community, there are alot of modern frameworks and libaries like Symfony2, Silex, Doctrine2, Monolog, Assetic, Twig. There are also tutorials and snippets about caching with Memached/Varnish in combination with Symfony2/Silex.

krapp 12y ago ↗

Ruby on Rails is a framework, not a language, so I think the better question here is between Rails and a PHP framework, say, Laravel.

At this point, unless the hipness of Rails over PHP matters to you, I would say PHP, if your primary concern is turning out sites quickly, for little cost. Also, perhaps the ecosystem around Wordpress and the other PHP frameworks are worth considering, as a way of making some money, also it's easy to find a host for PHP that's inexpensive. But I don't think one is probably much more 'right' than the other - it might be that, on average, you can charge more for a Rails site than a PHP one.

dansmog 12y ago ↗

thanks. i guess it still comes down to me choosing, i will stick with php for sometime then move over ruby on rails. i need resource that can help me learn php well.