Guest wrote:
I am in the process of trying to get a site developed by a programmer. I've had many offers to program the site, and one particular programmer wants to do the backend in Ruby on Rails. I initially wanted the site to be developed in PHP/MySQL, as it seemed to make the most sense for this kind of site. But I know nothing about Ruby. Are there any drawbacks to using Ruby? Is there anything I should know about?
Only pick a programmer who agrees to write unit tests for each feature. That technique improves quality, and makes the bug rate almost non-existent.
Next, Rails also uses MySQL too, so that's not a factor. (However, Rails makes switching to any other database spectacularly easy, but that's usually not very important.)
Next, pick the programmer who wants to use the language that typically requires less code to implement more features. Ruby almost always requires less code.
So if your developer agrees to write unit tests, you should see well more than twice the productivity that you are familiar with.
