ActsAsFlinn

So those of you following my blog know that after two years of being a full time Rubyist I’ve been tossed back into the cruel and unusual work of PHP development. I’ve really had to think long about my own development history when passing judgement on the current code base I am working with. What I’ve come to find is that the things I love about Ruby on Rails are logic, reason and proven best practices. What I dislike about PHP development is preference, opinion and tyranny.

“What do you mean by that?” What I mean is just this. Ruby on Rails has been at the forefront of emerging technologies and is consistently endorsed by well respected leaders in development technology like ThoughtWorks and countless innovators in the industry. It has introduced professional development techniques to the masses in ways that are unobtrusive and encourage thoughtful progressive improvement. What I like most of all – the things that have made it into Rails have been well thought out features that are supported by logic and reason NOT opinion.

What I’m finding in my return to PHP is that people just do things because they like it this way or that way. It’s a matter of personal preference. There is a complete lack of standards on how to best get something done. That usually means brute force wet (!DRY) code that does the job with the amount of style and grace as a bull in a china shop. I also think you see tyranny over reason in the PHP world because it’s a matter of preference. When you boil it down Ruby seems to be a philosophy whereas PHP is just a tool.

If you don’t care about efficiency stop reading now. Some readers might have caught that last bit “does the job” and said “well it does the job.” Yes it does the job for so long…then you change something…then it breaks something unintentionally. But you don’t know that it broke because you have no way of testing other than to put a person in front of a web browser or worse yet wait for a support ticket from your customer. Then you have no way of refactoring because everything is so fucking wet that your refactoring is actually rewriting from the ground up. If your grumbling – I told you to stop reading.