It’s also an insult to Rails to imply that Rails favors one architecture over the other. Database normalization itself is what favors the former. It’s the more efficient, robust and flexible representation of the data. Of course that’s a theoretical perspective, as soon as you have to scale then you have far more important considerations.

The worst part is this kind of article leaves the door open for the real idiots to come out in droves. Just look at phpimpact, so sure that Ruby is a technology more appropriate for “content management systems” or that there aren’t any Ruby jobs. I hate to break it to you phpimpact, but based on your level of discourse, I’d say your friend’s problem getting a programming job has nothing to do with Ruby.

Please, for the love of god, would everyone just go read someone who knows what they’re talking about, study it, internalize it, then realize that off-the-cuff punditry actually makes the blogosphere stupider than listening to someone who actually has a clue:

http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html

The qualities that PHP apps lack, can be fixed with best development practices. However, the weaknesses other languages have, tend to be more intrinsic to the language.

What’s wrong with:

SELECT * FROM tweets INNER JOIN following ON tweets.posterID = following.buddyID WHERE following.userid = ‘xxxx’

It doesn’t scale. Anyone who has built a high scale application will tell you that joins on huge tables absolutely murder performance.

I doubt it was time to market that let to the architecture you describe above, since there is plenty of robust scalable messaging code already out there which would be a much easier start than coding yet another. I think it’s more to do with the developers being oop wank^H^H^H^Hbelievers desperately pushing square pegs through round holes.

I am not the anon user before, but if you use PHP then it is your own fault.

PHP can do nothing that either python or ruby cant. People only are lazy and opted to use php, which is thus the only “strength” php has - the http://www.

And php is such an ugly language that over the next few years, either python or ruby - or both - will leave PHP behind. If php does not change a great many things.

Nice article.

> The reason there are more job vacancies for PHP developers is because a majority (in
> Australia at least) of design houses have been working in it for years.

That’s absurd. I’m a PHP, Python and Ruby programmer and for all our front-end development we use PHP. Honestly, do you really think we are going to believe that people use PHP because it’s an old habit? Please.