Ruby on Rails OR PHP ? (for backend web programming)

Question

Which provides more functionality ? Which is better ? What is the status of both these languages being used ?

Answer 1

PHP is widely used.

Answer 2

Comparing PHP to Ruby On Rails is not fair. PHP is far more popular than Ruby on Rails, only because Ruby on Rails is a web framework, not a programming language. Ruby on Rails is comparable to Zend Framework, Codeigniter, Laravel, Symfony2, CakePHP and many other PHP-based web frameworks.

Let's compare PHP and Ruby.

PHP is a widely used programming language. It is used to build websites like Facebook. So, you can guess the power of this language. PHP is also considered to be faster, more stable, has more documentation and there is a large number of developers out there. So, there community is very big. It is widely available on most of the hosting services.

Again, If you want to learn Ruby before PHP, I have a warning for you. Some concepts in Ruby get confusing quickly though, and if you have no experience in any other programming language, you may end up going through motions without understanding the underlying concepts.

Building a few things with raw PHP and SQL helps you really understand what's going on under the covers if you're interested in web apps. 

Answer 3

If you meant Ruby instead of Ruby on Rails, I can just say that PHP7 is faster. Take a look at about last part of the following infographic by Zend team that shows PHP7 is faster than Ruby (version 2.1):

http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic

Just I'm sure about performance. I'm not really sure about functionality. Again about PHP7, it exactly has some new features, but don't know much about Ruby.