Why Ruby rather than PHP?

[DenverDave]

I guess the direct question from someone that knows some PHP, is what are the advantages of Ruby over PHP?

[Fenrir2]

I started with PHP, and I use Ruby now. The advantages are:

- Get something ready faster
- Less mistakes, less debugging
- Has blocks (maybe the most important point!)
- Feels better
- True OOP
- ...

What's not so good about Ruby?

- Less documentation
- Less webhosting for Ruby/Rails

[Brak]

Less documentation? I think there's plenty of documentation, or are you forgetting the Core/StdLib API's and the free Pragmatic Programmers' Programing with Ruby?

The documentation isn't as friendly, and it's different (due to the nature of ruby) but after you get a hang of it, it's very easy to use.

Pinning feature against feature for PHP vs Ruby is pointless. For me, it's just the fact that Ruby feels right. The code comes out much cleaner, and everything is just easier to do generally. Play around with it a few nights and see if it feels right to you.

[xmitchx]

I came from PHP to Ruby and the advantages I found:

- faster development because ruby is very high level
- faster web development because the framework i use (rails) is awesome!
- less bugs with web development because of rails built in testing structure
- very nice object oriented programming with mixins and the like

Bad things I found about Ruby:

- Deploying applications is not as easy but still, it's not difficult.
- Slow, unless you use FastCGI or something like that

I recommend Ruby.

[Dokkalfr]

I used to think that deploying a ruby app was harder than PHP until I start using PEAR on my PHP projects

[Fenrir2]

@Brak: I said: "Less documentation" ;-). And PHP has much more documentation, but Ruby has enough documentation. What I still miss is a .CHM file for the Ruby code/stdlib. Does anyone have that?