I want to start this off by saying I’m not bashing ruby or any specific language. I want to share hang ups that I went through and other’s have went through, when dealing with hype about other development languages and frameworks.

While surfing around the internets today I came across a blog post from Gravatar and it really hit home with me. Basically Gravatar rewrote its entire site from Ruby on rails to PHP. Below is an excerpt:

The first thing we did, after stabilizing the service, was set out to rewrite Gravatar in PHP. Now before we launch into any holy wars I’d like to point out that our decision on this matter had nothing to do with Ruby, or Rails — in fact we have a great respect for both! The reason, the only reason, we switched is that PHP is our core competency at Automattic. As a PHP application we will be able to apply the sum total of our collective abilities to bear on any problems that Gravatar might face. The guys I work with are genuinely some of the most technically gifted people I know!

The line in bold above is what really set me straight and this applies to any language.

The bottom line is this: Develop with what you know and don’t get hung up on deciding which language to build your app with or which framework is the best. Just do it, you have bigger decisions to deal with. It doesn’t really matter if you use Ruby & Rails or PHP & Cake, what matters is your product.

I’ve been developing in PHP since 2000 and it has been my core language for web development ever since. I’ve been reading up on Ruby/Rails in my spare time this year and I’ve found Ruby to be a beautiful language and Rails is a great framework, but I can accomplish the same thing in PHP right now without the learning curve and the end result will be the same.