In the spirit of the holiday, Mike Naberezny has his own take on the whole "simplicity" and "clean code" arguments between the different camps (PHP/Python/Ruby) and gives an example of a simple way PHP can handle your Secret Santa needs.

Today, I ran across Ruby Secret Santa. I couldn't help but think to myself, "That's sort of nice looking but wow, for a little thing like Secret Santa, how much overkill is that?" Here's the same thing in PHP, minus the database fetch (add it in two lines).

That's less than half the code. I think this is a fair comparison because it directly compares PHP to Ruby, without any "frameworks" or other middleware in between. Which one do you think is extremely simple?

I like how he puts it as well:

I think that Rails is a phenomenal tool, but it’s tooling — not a language. I am sure that great tools will come for PHP as well, and that PHP itself will always be a language that is both highly productive and high performance. Do you Yahoo!?