An example of something along the lines of method_missing, http://www.veracon.net/stuff/__call.php.

PHP’s had its time on the web. If it were possible to produce a magnificent framework, it would have been done by now. As it stands now there’s ten billion shitty frameworks out there. I’ve tried some of them (including symfony) and they cannot even be compared to Rails. It’s like comparing a slow-cooked rack of ribs to spam. This entirely stems from PHP’s language restrictions. DHH himself began writing Rails in PHP, but couldn’t do it.

Veracon>>
I think Avinash said it best. Ruby doesn’t need commenting. It’s simply that elegant. Also, I know of nothing like method_missing in PHP. If someone would like to show me otherwise, i’d be glad to see it.

As you may have guessed, it just unpacks each key and value of the dictionary (hash, associative array if you will) and prints it. Granted, it looks much better than PHP code — and Ruby’s version does too.

I again agree that the PHP/RoR comparison is not fair; there is no way that you can compare PHP to a development framework.

Judging by what you said, I think you would actually like Python, which, I believe produces beautiful code. Not as beautiful as Ruby, which I believe is the only language that I have used apart from BASIC that truly doesn’t need commenting. In my opinion, that is what makes beautiful code. Python also has some fantastic frameworks, TurboGears and Django come to mind. I’ve tried the former, and it is absolutely brilliant.

Someone mentioned it above - I too would like to see a critical comparison between Rails and a PHP framework such as Symfony. I haven’t tried Symfony yet, and I’ve been torn between it and Rails. A link to someone who’s compared them?

I tend to favor the OO in ruby as well, and that is one of the things that attracts me to the language, but honestly there is no reason you could not write very similar code in PHP5 with some use of the magic methods like __call() and __get(), and some SPL for making an object traversable with foreach:


$user = User::find_by_username_and_password('kneath', 'password');
foreach ($user->articles as $article) { print $article->title; }


Is this example really that much uglier than the ruby syntax? You have to remember that the “find_by_username_and_password” and “user.articles” are not native Ruby. These are parts of Rails/ActiveRecord, and can be easily emulated in most dynamic languages.

I think there is a lot of FUD going around about PHP from people who don’t quite understand the full capabilities. I think we’ll see some better comparisons once Zend releases their framework. I don’t believe that it will be real competition for Rails since a lot of PHP developers seem to reject the idea of the framework.

No one can deny that 37signals have redefined what a web application is. That’s what I’m talking about.

Mark Anthony>>

Pssh. Why not debate how to pluralize octopus? ;)

Veracon>>

I completely agree beauty is up to the developer, and how he creates his code. But there is something to say about the language’s ability. I’ve not played with Python much, so I really didn’t try to compare it to Ruby. I believe many languages, similar to Ruby, are capable of creating wonderful code. However, I think there are also a lot of languages that restrict the freedoms that allow such beauty. In my experience, PHP is one of them. There is absolutely no way to create a call as elegant as this in PHP:

user = User.find_by_username_and_password('kneath', 'password');
user.articles.each{ |a| puts a.title }

A lot of this can be attributed to Ruby’s lax syntax rules. A lot of it to method_missing. A lot of it to pure OO. PHP (and other languages) simply cannot compare.