That’s the dumbest name I’ve heard since “DJ Ditty” (Dell’s failed iPod-wannabe).

http://rebol.com/

It was designed by a friend of mine. It’s a general-purpose object-based language, but it’s finding some application in Web services.

Schwab

Really, after the whole “holy crap a programming language that you can sprinkle into html” novelty wore off for me, PHP became sort of a bitch to deal with.

If you want to take a half-step backwards, get a load of this: http://perl.apache.org/embperl/

@foo = split($a)

Perl will generally ignore (unless if you have explicitly undefined $a), versus ruby:

foo = b.split(//)
puts foo # Need to cause ruby to act on b..
-:1: undefined local variable or method `b’ for main:Object (NameError)

Which isn’t a _bad_ thing, but it takes some time getting used to considering that your variables may not always be filled the way you expect them to, or that it may have turned into an array in an object and whoops! Can’t treat it quite like a string. But it does teach diligence.

This is actually something on my mind a bit, though - we’re redoing our major software system at work in the next few quarters, and one of the discussions is whether to continue using Perl - we all know and love it, but it has limitations and is starting to feel creaky, or ruby, which is the fast new hotness that none of us know too well.

It would be overkill, but you’d learn a lot of marketable skills. :)

For the site, stick with what you’re good at. If you decide to change languages later on that’s fine, but if you make this your first attempt at RoR (or any language) you’re going to put off any future upgrades because the code you’ve have to change is crap.

Once you’ve got everything cleaned up and relaunched start working on RoR stuff, either as smaller projects or as temporary things that you don’t really care about. That way if you need to wipe something out it’s no big loss and the site still runs like normal. When you’re confident that you’ve got RoR figured out, that’s a good time to re-do the site.

I know how fun it is to try to remake everything in the new language you just started learning, but in the long run it pretty much sucks. My website was my first PHP project 5.5 years ago and I’m still running my old, craptastic programming because I don’t want to dick around with trying to make changes while having it continue to work. Eventually I’ll just have to blow it all up and start over, but that ain’t happening any time soon.

Stick with PHP and get the damn thing back up already; I neeeeeed my captions FIX!!!!