I’m finding that I really like the syntax of Ruby and the philosophy of Rails. Both are straightforward and ‘clean’. But I’ve been tinkering with Laravel, too, because it runs on more shared hosting services since it’s just good ol’ PHP.
PHP and Laravel are equally powerful, but their syntax is messy and strained. Laravel’s philosophy is explicit over implicit, which is almost the exact opposite of Rails’ convention over configuration. With Laravel, there’s a lot of code to be written and then followed for debugging. Rails requires you to understand the conventions because there’s a lot less code to read and write.
As much I as like Rails, and hope to continue using it, I don’t think the documentation is as strong as Laravel’s and there seems to be less community support for Rails. When I’ve gotten stuck, which has been a lot, I get unstuck more quickly with Laravel. Either I find the documentation explains it well or the community (by which I mean Stack Overflow) comes through.
A very cool thing about using Rails is that you don’t need all the includes and use directives as in PHP. Rails just ‘knows’ where the definitions are for any functions needed.
Rails is strongly opinionated. Something that I’m learning the hard way is that doing things The Rails Way may not be the first way I think of, nor the way I’m most comfortable, but in the end I have many fewer headaches if I just do it that way.