OHLOH.NET

rubyonrails-talk
1

http://www.ohloh.net/wiki/articles/php_eats_rails

It's an interesting article which I am posting here not to yank people's chains and I think the graphs tell a story that the author can't see - that Rails is still in it's infancy.

The graph representing the 'new projects' is interesting too.

Of course there is a base assumption that when it comes to coding, the more lines the better. :wink:

Craig

2

Craig White wrote:

http://www.ohloh.net/wiki/articles/php_eats_rails

It's an interesting article which I am posting here not to yank people's chains and I think the graphs tell a story that the author can't see - that Rails is still in it's infancy.

The graph representing the 'new projects' is interesting too.

Of course there is a base assumption that when it comes to coding, the more lines the better. :wink:

Craig

None of the graphs say anything about Rails specifically. They're measuring aspects of Ruby development.

The first graph, as you point out, is not a great measurement of anything. All it shows is that more lines of PHP are being produced. It doesn't say anything about the infacy of Ruby.

The second graph, again, doesn't speak specifically about 'infancy' of rails at all. It's talking about relative programmer community sizes. Ruby and Rails could both be well out of their infancy and retain a similarly flat line on that graph.

The third graph is particularly telling in the context of the other two.

Looking at all three graphs together you can say that a relatively steady percentage of rails developers is producing a disproportionate number of new projects in a relatively programmer-efficient language, while a fluctuating percentage of PHP developers are contributing more and more code to fewer projects over time.

My biassed interpretation is that PHP is demonstrating its inability to scale at the language level, and that the PHP framework is a relatively poor choice for the current crop of web applications - something many of us know from experience.

They don't seem to say to me that PHP is eating Rails for breakfast.

3

Ugh.

"Looking at all three graphs together you can say that a relatively steady percentage of rails developers"

Ruby developers, of course.

4

Friend: that’s the entire point. We’re writing less lines of code.

QED.