Justin French have survived the first week on his transitionary journey from PHP to Rails. I have special sympathy for refugees from that camp as I used to do a lot of PHP myself not too long ago. Justin sums up his experience with:

I also think that a Rails developer is inherently a “better” programmer by force. PHP makes it very easy for anyone (myself included) to slap together some poorly planned procedural code and claim the title of “PHP Web Application Developer”. Rails on the other hand at least tries to make us better programmers by default.

It’s certainly possible to write PHP that doesn’t succumb to the draw of becoming a big ball of mud, but the structure is completely self-imposed. Easy to slip if you’re not careful.

Seems like Justin has quite a following of other PHP’ers curious about Rails, so its great to see that he’s continuing to blog the transition and hopefully instill others with the courage to do the same.