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This is what the team behind Discourse is attempting to address somewhat, making Ruby software as idiot-proof to set up as PHP applications.

Whether they will end up succeeding is yet to be seen, but this does definitely seem like an area where competition will benefit the greater good, as displacing PHP with any one of the better designed languages out there would benefit the internet as a whole.

I do wonder though: is the procedural nature of PHP equally responsible for it's adoption by inexperienced developers?

Sure, PHP is cheap and widely available, but you also don't need to understand the concepts behind object orientation to hack together a "dynamic" website with a few includes. And at that point you're just familiar enough with PHP to favor it for future development.

discuss

dubcanada|13 years ago

Good luck! But that's going to be hard. LAMP on Windows is as easy as downloading a exe file and running it. LAMR (or what ever you want) will never be that simple. It's the nature of the language. They are completely different.

I'd like to believe maybe one day someone will commit the 6 months to make such a thing happen. But I really doubt it.

samuellevy|13 years ago

I think that's a chicken/egg situation there.

corry|13 years ago

Agreed. As is often brought up in PHP threads, the biggest thing is universal adoption of PHP in web hosting. People learning how to stitch together web pages aren't going to grab a VPS, learn the complexity of managing the server, and use something complex like Rails (where there's a language, a framework, and MVC to learn).

With PHP --> the newbie just has to FTP the files up and it works. Fewer variables to manage, fewer things to learn. You go from 0 to 60 much faster. Now, you probably will go from 60 to 100 much much slower than with a different stack, but that's a different discussion...

bradwestness|13 years ago

I agree, and I think that means it will be very difficult for any language that requires more understanding of OOP concepts to get started with will have a hard time competing with PHP in this arena.