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I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.
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I hired one of the best Rails programmers in the world (JeremyKemper aka bitsweat), and we set off on this huge task with intensity.The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not havebeen more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it dothings it was never intended to do.
But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-ablewith a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask whyyou’re really doing this.)
SEVEN REASONS I SWITCHED BACK TO PHP AFTER 2 YEARS ON RAILS: #1 - “IS THERE ANYTHING RAILS/RUBY CAN DO THAT PHP CAN’T DO? … (thinking)… NO.†For 2 years, I thought Rails is genius, PHP is shit. Rails is powerful, PHP is crap.
I was nearly killing my company in the name of blindly insisting Rails was the answer to all questions, timeframes be damned.
But when I took a real emotionless non-prejudiced look at it, I realized the language didn’t matter that much.
Ruby is prettier. Rails has nice shortcuts. But no big shortcuts I can’t code-up myself in a day if needed.
Looked at from a real practical point of view, I could do anything in PHP, and there were many business reasons to do so.
#2 - OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION By the old plan (ditching all PHP and doing it all in Rails), there wasgoing to be this One Big Day, where our entire Intranet, Storefront,Members’ Login Area, and dozens of cron shell scripts were ALL going tohave to change. 85 employees re-trained. All customers and clientscalling up furious that One Big Day, with questions about the newsystem.
Instead, I was able to slowly gut the ugly PHP and replace it with beautiful PHP. Launch in stages. No big re-training.
#3 - DON’T WANT WHAT I DON’T NEED I admire the hell out of the Rails core gang that actually understandevery line inside Rails itself. But I don’t. And I’m sure I will neveruse 90% of it.
With my little self-made system, every line is only what’s absolutely necessary. That makes me extremely happy and comfortable.
#4 - IT’S SMALL AND FAST One little 2U LAMP server is serving up a ton of cdbaby.com traffic damn fast with hardly any load.
#5 - IT’S BUILT TO MY TASTES I don’t need to adapt my ways to Rails. I tell PHP exactly what I want to do, the way I want to do it, and it doesn’t complain.
I was having to hack-up Rails with all kinds of plugins and mods to getit to be the multi-lingual integration to our existing 95-tabledatabase.
My new code was made just for me. The most efficient possible code to work with our exact needs.
#6 - I LOVE SQL Speaking of tastes: tiny but important thing : I love SQL. I dream in queries. I think in tables.
I was always fighting against Rails and its migrations hiding my beloved SQL from me.
#7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I sayâ€paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.
I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.
But the main reason that any programmer learning any new languagethinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is becausehe’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code,compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP isugly!†But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairlydiscriminating against it now.
It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.
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Ok. All that being said, I’m looking forward to using Rails some daywhen I start a brand new project from scratch, with Rails in mind fromthe beginning.