It is comments like this which make me dislike reading the comments of any article with "php" in the title. Not only is it extremely biased, it is presented without any facts or logic to back it up and should be taken as it is given, an opinion.
PHP is an extremely powerful language for building websites and has come along way since it's original release, such as object-orientation, etc.
Admittedly, PHP has many flaws, such as poor error handling (for a newcomer, most veterans in this language know them off by hand and actually find them useful) and poor function naming, some are CamelCase, some are under_scored and some are illegiblyalloneword, but every language has flaws.
This is really the kind of cool-kid attitude which HN doesn't need, it shows a lack of due thought and that you have little to no experience of the language itself, if you had, your comment would have been. "This article was on HN 6 months ago, but, I believe that RoR is better than PHP for these reasons... " and not simple "PHP sucks."
I don't think its really reasonable to say 'X sucks' without taking uses cases into account. While PHP has a number of shortcomings, it is great for things where ruby/rails would be huge waste of time. Build some small brochure websites in rails, and build the same ones in PHP. I bet you'll be done much sooner & deployed more cost effectively using PHP. This might not be the kind of work you aspire to doing, but I think the example still holds.
If you're going to act like a jerk in all your posts, which I actually have no problem with, I'd suggest removing your full name and bio from your HN account 'about' section.
Programming in C! How encouraging for the beginner! Why not ruby?
Look, astrophysics has a word for spots on the sun. Sunspots. Meanwhile the most fundamental molecule of life is deoxyribonucleic acid. That last word is a product of the classic education system which encouraged "gentlemen" (today: "engineers") to study Latin and Greek.
Now I'm not discouraging the teaching and book-printing of rudimentary languages like C and Latin, but maybe C (and Latin) aren't meant to be learned today by beginners in a conversational manner. Students who are curious will naturally look back to ancestor-languages (I have books on C and Perl now as a ruby programmer). For Latin and Greek we have sites like etymonline.com, which are great.
What is it with you guys? Are you worried that once the newbies go ruby they'll never go back? Back where? We all need to evolve as developers. Haha soapbox I apologize. I like C syntax.
I think much of this course is also about "under the hood" - what's going on at a memory level, and fun things to do with microprocessors to get an understanding of the whole shebang. I think if you can be taught to get good grasp of the execution stack, heap memory and pointers, then teaching yourself ruby, python, or any other more abstract language would be a breeze.
If you answer to yourself "none of them", there are two possibilities. No, three.
Third one first: you're young enough to not feel guilty about not taking enough risk. First one: you're not taking enough risk. Second one: you know who you are.
