This example seems to be a great demo of why people do not like working with PHP. PHP makes the shit method the massively simpler way and the good method much harder. Now you open yourself up to risks like what happens if we accidentally let some user input change the file opened as well as the content written.
While with rails, to do basically anything, you already have a full db ready and incrementing a counter using the ORM is even easier than opening a text file. So people avoid PHP because it most likely involves dealing with absolute crap code written with no understanding.
I don't find these kinds of what-ifs very useful. I haven't used Rails, but does it somehow prevent you from accepting user input and programming it to go where you say you want it to go? Isn't there an element of "holding it wrong" with any language or framework?
Rails actually does do a good job of treating user input as dangerous and it can often detect when user input is being used in the wrong places like directly in to sql. And with industry standard tools like brakeman, you can have CI alert you of most cases where user input is not safely handled.
That's way too complicated for the person just starting out and wanting to add a counter to his small website.
Nobody starting out with programming today will start with Rails. They might start with Javascript, but more than likely they'll start with PHP. It's accessible and SIMPLE.
>PHP makes the shit method the massively simpler way and the good method much harder.
How it makes it harder? Or you compare PHP a language with Rails a framework? Maybe shut up if you have no idea or show us a pure Ruby code that does the same thing. Or install the most popular PHP framework, really learn that and then tell us that PHP made things harder. I don't know Ruby or rails so I can't shit on that like an idiot.
While with rails, to do basically anything, you already have a full db ready and incrementing a counter using the ORM is even easier than opening a text file. So people avoid PHP because it most likely involves dealing with absolute crap code written with no understanding.