Is php worth it?

[eluser]Jamie Rumbelow[/eluser]
[quote author="überfuzz" date="1259760732"]I might be seen as a bit bias, I didn't fall for RoR. If it's lack of knowledge from my side the following text is off target.

There's a big plus that I don't think anyone has put forward here. Using php you'll be able to do advanced mathematics. Calculate movements using analytic mechanics. Etc... Furthermore if you know how to write programs and descent code you'll soon find that there's more things to code than just web-applications.[/quote]

I think there's a certain amount of naïvety in that post; and alas a reason why no-one has put forward your idea. You can do the same with Ruby! In fact, I'd go as far to say that Ruby is better for desktop, mathematical and analytical work. PHP was designed first and foremost to be a web applications language whereas Ruby was designed to be a general-purpose scripting language.

Before I get accused of being a Rails fan-boy again, let me first state that I love CodeIgniter. CodeIgniter pretty much drives my development world, so no, I don't think your successful dutch friend (who sounds like DHH to me) is right in the slightest.

The superiority, and often the bane of CodeIgniter is that it's much more flexible than Rails. Ruby on Rails is a fantastic framework, and I feel they do things very well, and that we can learn a lot from them, but it's just not as flexible as Rails. Just by enjoying using Rails and spending a few hours coding on a client project I managed to come up with some really nice Convention over Configuration based coolness for my controllers, and it still adheres to a lot of CodeIgniter's principles. Heck, I think it feels like it's part of the CI core it's that natural.

Because of that reason I HIGHLY reccommend learning PHP, and specifically using CodeIgniter. Even David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails likes PHP and thinks it is well suited for web tasks. And just as I would encourage any current members of the community to try out Rails, Django, and other frameworks, I'd encourage them to try out CodeIgniter too.