Ask HN: PHP & Python/Ruby?

In general... ruby there are many ways to do things ( bit of a perl influence there ), python tends towards one sanctioned way to do things. That is a horrible overstatement but somewhat true.

I would advise you to send a few days with each and see which seems more natural. I prefer ruby w/ its blocks and more smalltalk and lisp-ish feel to things but I did python programming for a number of years and you will be fine learning either.

You should switch from php even if you go back to php to learn something new and expand your knowledge AND don't stop there, keep learning and go father afield later. Pick a functional language like scheme, clojure, haskell etc and learn that. Get up and cozy w/ smalltalk for some serious OO learning. Spend sometime with Erlang. Never stop switching what you use to learn even if you keep going back to other things to pay your bills- Java, Perl & C++ payed by bill for 7 years but during that time I learned Dylan, Smalltalk, Scheme, Python & several more.. each one I learned made me a better programmer.

Then I learned Ruby on Rails.

Kohana and codeigniter set up an MVC environment much like Ruby on rails does. The biggest difference for me is that if you look at kohana, you see how much effort it takes to get PHP to act in a way that Ruby does natively.

Kohana sets up PHP so you have access to all sorts of nifty methods by accessing the system Kohana classes and helpers. In ruby, everything is an object.

So long story short, I find DSL's in PHP try very hard to emulate how Ruby already behaves. So I prefer Ruby frameworks like sinatra and Rails.

For me, it mostly comes down to the fact that there's almost always an easy answer for questions in Rails. Pagination? Sorting? AJAX? There's usually a "Best" way too, that makes it easy in deciding which library/plugin to choose.