Extremely, extremely subjective question here, but its something I've been struggling with for quite a while. I've seriously tried to become a reasonable PHP coder for the past several years. But I've really failed every time. I hate to describe myself as a beginner, b/c I've been designing websites (using WordPress, Drupal, etc) for years, but still I just can't seem get better at programming.

Could it be that I have some kind of allergy to PHP? I went through Chris Pine's awesome into to Ruby about a week ago (for about the fifth time), and though it did all all seem much clearer to me than PHP, I wondered if I was just switching languages to find an easy way out?

The things I struggle with in PHP all seem elementary—when to use a function, how to return database queries in foreach/while statements, when to turn those queries into reusable functions, adding arguments to functions, etc, etc. And all the OOP stuff that I keep seeing these days just files over my head.

I guess my question(s) are: Am I going about learning how to program in the wrong way? Do I have some aversion to PHP that's preventing me from catch on? If I keep pushing at Ruby/Rails, will it just eventually 'click'. Or, the one I fear, am I just unlikely to ever be a programmer?

Honesty appreciated.

Terry