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Yes... Its true. Ruby lacks lots of community support whenit comes to real life.

there are no examples because Ruby community is too busy bashing other languages and working hard on turning whole world against themselves

That's not true at all. Sometimes we lovingly admire ourselves.

I can't believe this post was voted up at all. Besides being a bit nonsensical, it is basically another "Rails is inferior because there aren't as many success stories as PHP" post. Everyone should know by now that this is ridiculous logic, used by people who use PHP and feel apprehensive about Rails. Why react this way? Rails doesn't make PHP any less relevant. PHP is still a great language for the web.

Mark Thomas, you're right. And the same arguments apply to Python, Groovy, Scala, probably even Java. Is java not wildly successful because most people can't name a Java bb engine or CMS?

I suspect English was not a first language here, contributing to the jumbled nature of the article. I took away from it that Ruby/Rails folks should spend more time doing and less time talking about doing. Not generally bad advice for the acerbic portion of the Rails community.

Taking your language du jour out of the picture, I think the larger point that the article did not address (though a comment did) is that if there is a good BB app (or whatever) in PHP, why on earth would you reinvent the wheel and write another one? There's too much to do to to spend time rehashing old things. If an existing app really doesn't meet your needs, then build it. That's what its all about.

When will the FUD stop - I'm wondering.

It seems that every once in a while, we see flamewars like these.

I believe it's all triggered by fear. Once you get to know other languages and platforms, you can tell which one suits you best and in which situations.

The author of this post doesn't know a CMS, an e-commerce application in Ruby ? There are quite a bit (ComatoseCMS, Radiant, Mephisto, Shopify...).

I can give one hint: if you feel afraid about what you don't know, embrace it and give it a try. You may be surprised of what you learn at the end of the day!

PHP has what? A 7-8 year old head start "on the web"? I remember using it when it was still called PHP/FI back in 96 I think. While Ruby has been around for a long time, people haven't been using it for web apps for a long time. And it IS true that Ruby has a lot of issues (performance of Matz Ruby interpreter, until Rack showed up it lacked a nice framework independent interface to the webservers - the CGI class certainly is NOT nice to work with, etc.). But PHP had lots of issues too, and it was a far more painful language to work with.

My blog is a couple of hundred lines of Ruby, and I've started posting lots of snippets of Ruby code. My previous job was a startup - we handled millions of request with Ruby based middleware with a frontend written in PHP to do the simple/stupid stuff... Now I manage a team of PHP developers. It's not either/or. PHP is still more appropriate for some things because of skills availability and performance...

But Ruby is a far nicer language. Even most PHP users I've talked to agree with that. All of Ruby's issues are addressable. Many of them are close to being solved. Each one that gets addressed chips away at the cases where PHP is more appropriate. I've mentioned Rack - it addressed a long standing issue of part of the complexity of deploying Ruby web apps. Most frameworks can now run with most webservers with no m*n problem - they just need, and mostly have, Rack adapters - my own site just uses a couple of tens of lines of glue code between my controllers and Rack, and no real framework. That's close to the kind of trivial deployability that drove a lot of early PHP adoption.