Coming from Rails, how does Laravel compares? If you know both languages, which one would you pick? I've this hunch that there's no reason to lick Laravel over Rails, since that latter is the bees and knees for web development.
Alternatively: what would you suggest someone getting into web development to learn? PHP or Ruby?
> If you know both languages, which one would you pick?
The one with the best density of good developers in your hiring region if the application ends up scaling.
> Alternatively: what would you suggest someone getting into web development to learn? PHP or Ruby?
Neither. I would tell them to get into the Javascript ecosystem - not because I think it's necessarily good, but because that's where most of the work is. I'd also reccomend picking up at least one other general purpose language to be a bit more rounded such as Golang, Java, C#, Python.
I have worked with both Laravel and Rails. I would still pick Ruby on Rails for my projects because I feel the Ruby's ecosystem is more mature than Laravel's.
Don't get me wrong –– Laravel (the framework) has some polished first party packages however, as soon as you step out to third party packages the quality drops significantly.
Alternatively: what would you suggest someone getting into web development to learn? PHP or Ruby?