The Java Posse Reminds Itself that Ruby is on Rails
In “Java Posse #145—Newscast for Oct 4th 2007,” the posse takes many minutes to discuss the opinion of Derek Silvers of CDBaby.com in “7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails.” It was a great opportunity to reposition Java after the Rails craze. To me, the arithmetic is primal: PHP/MySQL runs in a fraction (as little as 15MB in virtual machine) of memory of that required for Rails, Plone and, hell yes, Java.
Since the opportunities for me to be generous are few in far between let me try to understand why the Rails heads at 37signals.com don’t have a huge, lengthy article rebutting Derek Silvers (Google is barely picking six hits): 37signals.com does not want to discuss this for legal reasons? According to the Java posse the inventor (?) of Rails just says “fuck off” to anyone who wants to bend the rigid Rails that makes your shit roll oh so smooth…
An insightful line that jumps right out at me from the Derek Silvers article is, “PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER.” So, in effect, Derek hired Jeremy Kemper to write a specification in Ruby that was translated into the relatively new (and seldom celebrated) Object-Oriented features of PHP.