I came to PHP from ASP (before they added the .net bit), before there was any form of classes available. One of the first things I spotted when coming to PHP was CakePHP, which I didn’t follow at the time but should have and the PHP code I wrote at the time was pretty poor. Certainly there was a long lag in PHP between when PHP came about and when good frameworks became available (Ruby came after PHP but CakePHP is based on Ruby on Rails). As you say the strong bond between Ruby and Ruby on Rails is a great thing. It teaches good practice to beginners in the code.

I’ll never understand why two open source programmers would choose to needlessly criticise each other’s choice of programming language. I guess there’s always competition between the languages which leads to us-and-them camps, especially when you’re at a Ruby On Rails demo, but the speaker should have known better. It seems like Ruby has made efforts to improve on PHP which is great, but when you stand on the shoulders of those that went before you don’t do yourself any favours by trying to dig a ditch under what you’re standing on.