Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you confusing tools with the language itself? Some would argue that Rails is nothing but a monkey-patched DSL that sits on top of Ruby. Whereas Ruby the *language* is certainly elegant, Rails is full of so much magic that I wonder if people really understand what is going on under the hood. I know he’s not the most popular guy, but I really think that Zed Shaw’s belief of looking at the source code of the tools you use is a very valuable experiment. Obviously this is not possible for some things (i.e. I don’t know if looking at the source code for Vim is going to convince me to use it) but if the Rails fanbois looked at Rails itself they might be surprised at what they find. I’m willing to bet that it’s not perfect. No framework is.

If you separate Rails from Ruby, then I think that you correct in stating that syntax of Ruby vs. that of PHP is a win for Ruby.

Add Rails to the equation and I don’t think it’s the overwhelming victory that it’s advocates would like to claim it is. I think it’s a draw now because while Rails had a big lead at one point, other frameworks in different languages have caught them and Rails might get passed by if they aren’t careful.

What is there to really choose between Rails and Django and CakePHP? All three promote the idea of rapid application development. All three use variations of the MVC design pattern. If a person’s argument against using something like CakePHP is “PHP’s syntax sux”, then I start to question their judgement.

Anyway, maybe i was rambling a bit there.

Pointless. “PHP sucks because of bad syntax” is an argument I’d expect from my 9 year-old daughter, not a good programmer like Joel.
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We’re talking about languages here right? So a lot of the argument is going to be centered around syntax, and the tools it provides you to do the most while writing the least amount of code …. no?
I mean, what else could you center on to criticize.

Sure, those things exist for Ruby too but often you only have one or two choices. PHP is absolutely rich in choices of third-party libraries.
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Ruby is a multipurpose scripting language so the libraries for just Ruby tend to be limited. But if you go into web development, and pull Rails into the shootout, then this statement no longer holds true.

The amount of well written (and tested) plugins/gems for Rails is simply astounding.

But you are right about being lazy. Being lazy to me, simply means I want to write as little code as possible in order to save me time. I know what I mean.

You are also right that I don’t like PHP’s syntax. In fact, the more I use Ruby, the more I get annoyed at PHP and its idiosyncrosies. (yeah I know I spelt that wrong). But please remember that my blog post was only reason #1 of 10, about why I prefer Ruby over PHP. And none of those reasons are likely to include talk about PHP’s good points – which there are plenty of by the way.

Anyway, whats wrong with being a fan boi? People always use that term in a negative way. I’m also a Jason Mraz fanboi, and a Lost fan boi. Is that bad?