Stefan Mischook says that folks in the PHP community need not be alarmed by the recent rise in popularity of Ruby. He says that although Ruby and PHP are both scripting languages that make developing web applications much easier than it is, each will appeal to a different audience. Ruby can be a bit too abstract and therefore will not fill the need of most "PHP’ers".

Stefan also says that PHP's procedural and OO versions only adds to its strength. "Objected oriented constructs are great for creating cleaner designs that are easier to maintain and promote the possibility of code reusability. Code reuseability is an often touted advantage of OOP, but from what I’ve seen in the Java world, it is not achieved so often. With OOP, there is a cost of added complexity and overhead - you simply have to write more code to do things when you do it via OOP." In contrast, everything is an object in Ruby and "the core language has very sophisticated constructs that need to be understood to use Ruby effectively - Ruby strength is also its weakness."

The post evoked a flurry of responses from the developer community.

To Stefan's credit he also points out that Ruby lends itself better to objec oriented design because it was built as an OO language. In PHP, however, OO capability has been ‘bolted’ onto a procedural framework.

"I would consider PHP the better choice because it is well established (lots of IDEs, open source projects, easy hosting etc ..) and proven. Ruby is just starting to get into the mainstream. and there are still some fundamental issues with Ruby and web development. For example: Ruby integration with APACHE is still not stable. It works … but there are known problems and can be a hassle to set up." concluded Stefan.