This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: "Your mouth will hang open" Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

PHP 5 is officially out. Congratulations to Zend and friends. Even though I haven't really dug into much PHP work for about a year (since leaving for Ruby), I have many fond memories and thanks to extend to PHP. It brought me up well. Not that I'd want to go back. My mind has embraced Ruby so completely that whenever I'm forced back into PHP (for maintanence) it twists and turns — Don't make us go back there, masta.

It appears too that I'm not the only one. On the Slashdot topic for the PHP 5 announcement, an anonymous coward modded "5, Interesting" extols the virtues of Ruby in constrast to Python:

If you've ever been programming Python and wished it was cleaner and less "arbitrarily verbose", you'd like Ruby. If you wonder why Python arbitrarily makes you say "len(str)" instead of "str.len()", you'll like Ruby. If you wonder why Python makes you type "def foo(self)" instead of just "def foo", you'll like Ruby. If you wonder why you should type verbose hard-to-read stuff like "[f for f in n if f < 4]" instead of something like "n.each { |f| f<4 }", the give Ruby a whirl.

That gives few pointers to many of the smaller things that turned me off Python and on Ruby. More importantly, the flattered me said, is his promotion of Rails:

If you do MVC-type web apps, your mouth will hang open when you use the highly dynamic Ruby on Rails (how do you add a new object to your app when you add a new database table? ONE LINE OF CODE. How do you add a new field to your object when you add a new column to the database? DO NOTHING.)

So since I'm addicted to hanging mouths marvelling the full dynamic being that is Ruby, I'll do my best to finish up the first release in no time at all. Despite being in Rome and Venice for the past two weeks, I got in an impressive amount of coding and documenting during all those down times travelling and chilling. Do stay tuned.