Recent web survey report shows us a surprising fact about PHP programmers deciding to leave PHP for Ruby on Rails.
Of course this survey isn’t necessarily the reason to claim the quality of the programming language it represents. I even convince that the numbers merely show us how programmers deal with the language they choosed.
There are many reasons why PHP programmer decides to leave for another language, but i think the most significant reason is because of many undisciplined PHP Programmers out there. They might not realized this, but they have made PHP looks really bad.
One of the thing they did so often is lack of attention in security aspect. Ilia showed us how many PHP codes out there are so fragile and open, waiting to be exploited. Just try this out by Google code search. Even the old problems like SQL injection still exists out there, thanks to those undisciplined PHP programmers.
The other thing undisciplined programmer often do is they still think they live in 90’s, where everything must be build from scratch, where OOP was not the option, where framework was not invented yet. They’re the ones who make coding in PHP such a mess and chaostic.
There are some reasons I belive why PHP was made so simple, it leaves us free to express ourself in the most unpredictable yet clever ways. Also it makes newbies so easy to learn it.
So using PHP in old fashion way will only make PHP looks bad, and many more people will leave it. That’s why i’m so excited with many PHP frameworks today, it gives us more power to build better and more secure web application.
Why there’s a “Ruby on Rails” column for people that currently use RoR on a graph showing the people who want to use… RoR? Am I reading something wrong?
the numbers merely show
There isnt enough information on the chart to understand what the numbers show!
We dont even know if they have been normalized for the breakdown between Perl/Python/PHP/etc programmers in the survey sample – maybe there were just a lot more PHP programmers.
What’s a RoR column doing there?
Yes i agree, that’s why i don’t quite believe it. But at least that made us to think PHP differently.
RoR is there for comparison sake. See how it down to zero.
I posted PHP specific searches simply because I felt it would be most relevant to the PHP audience. To think that PHP is the only web scripting language that makes it easy to have security holes is silly. I can easily craft you queries to find similar issues in Perl, Python,Java and yes, even Ruby applications where the code is public. A quick search on Google will show you plenty of people doing exactly that and posting it to their own blogs.
For people concerned about security on Ruby on rails, I’d strongly recommend reading the following thread: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/76671#120390 or try this URL: http://www.ruby-forum.com/search?query=“>////\
Furthermore, the stats are based on a closed survey that costs $800 minimum to see, of 5,000 developers where the data is not publicly available. Given millions of programmers out there you could easily survey a targeted audience that will allows you to draw all manner of fun conclusions, such as that ASP.NET is the choice if 99% of the developers out there.
Thanks Ilia. I still love PHP as much as before. I just want to make a warm alarms to what i called as undisciplined programmer. Then again, perhaps i’m one of them.
Thanks for came by, gee i never thought i’d drag the master here
🙂
@Eristemena: Except that RoR isn’t zero, it’s labeled as “0.26”.
And there’s no explanation of what the heck that y-axis is measuring. “Likelihood” sounds like a probability, but probability runs from 0 to 1, while this graph has things running up to 3.45.
So what the heck are the units here? Without knowing that, the entire graph is meaningless.
Yes, I agree with your point about the lack of use of frameworks in PHP in bad applications.
I still do not understand why people mention so much about Ruby/and Rails. I only think that RoR is a simple solution to a class of simple issues. PHP is far more powerful to Ruby in term of web platform support. The only thing it lack is a/some mature and elegant framework(s) like RoR. But with Solar framework and Zend Framework, I believe that it is about to come.
Ruby on Rails is not a revolution. It is a evolution. PHP5/6 is a evolution too.