if you don't have complicated statistical/machine learning needs, i'd recommend ruby on rails every time. it's so fast to get started and productive. and the language is performant enough to get you to initial success (at which point you can choose to spend money to attain greater performance).
It is a huge mountain of work you have ahead yourself if you are a newbie in both domains.
Sure you might be able to slap together a simple CRUD app following a tutorial but truly knowing what you are doing will take months, if not years. It is a huge investment.
When I first came across Ruby -- and particular Rails -- I loathed it. Ruby's syntax allows you to get pretty creative, and jumping into Rails + Rspec is like jumping into a Perl repo that's been managed by 3 different people over ten years. There's all kind of things that -- because the syntax is so loose -- it's not clear what's going on. It doesn't help (in my opinion) that Ruby's own style guide almost encourages this: dropping the "()" from functions that take no arguments; Eiminating "{}" around certain hashes passed into functions; The "!" marker having a seemingly different meaning in almost every library, etc...
When you're new to Rails and Rspec, it's easy to have no idea what's going on.
That being said, you can prototype an entire business in a few days Rails. It is that easy. It's incredibly polished. It's opinionated in mostly right ways, and all of its libraries are, too -- which means you don't often find people doing crazy shit (except Devise, everyone is always doing something crazy with Devise).
As much as I hated Rspec with a passion, I do feel like it's the best testing frameworks I've ever come across. It lets you be SUPER expressive about what you're testing.
I go against the Ruby & Rspec style guides on a few things, but I feel like no other combination let's you write code that's so expressive.
And, finally, anything you want to do in Rails has a library built in that does it very well. And unlike in -- say JavaScript for example -- there aren't ten libraries to pick from. There is a clear winner, and I think that's good for the community.
Also, almost every major API you can imagine has a Rails Gem so that it plays nicely with the framework.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Django and I still think it's a great framework. My love for Python, Elixir, and Kotlin are strong.
Ruby & Rails are by no means perfect, but I do feel like it's a very clear winner if you're starting a new web business. The number of companies I've seen flounder because they wanted an App + a website + (obviously) backend business logic... and all of that in one language, in one code base -- it's impressive. I've seen a lot of Rails businesses fail. But despite what people warn about scaling, I've never seen a Rails-based company fail because of Rails. Plenty have flourished -- Shoppify, GitHub, AirBNB, etc...
I could go on and on about the advantages WRT hiring, too. Don't even get me started...
Seems like this describes any app in any language I’ve ever worked on. Certainly Rails apps are more prone to this phenomenon because of the low barrier entry. Having worked with apps that have grown from Rails 2 through 5 (and soon 6) it’s quite possible to build Rails apps that “age well”.
Case in point for a Rails app that can age well is GitHub. When they launched in 2008 they were probably using Rails 2.0.2 (best guess based on release notes).
I am only familiar with Django and Rails, can't comment about Laravel.
If you are building a basic CRUD app, definitely stick with Rails. If you are doing some kind of CMS or need machine learning pipeline, go with Python.
A warning about Ruby/Rails: some folks have moved on to shinier languages/frameworks and as a result there are lots of unmaintained gems (gems are 3rd party libraries in the Ruby world) out there. For instance, I needed a curl wrapper written in Ruby. Nothing worked for me so I ended up forking Ethon [0]. I am hesitant to send PRs, since I doubt that they will get merged. Now I am maintaining two codebases at once. I will probably rewrite it from scratch at some time.
A warning about Python/Django: dependency management is kind of a mess [1]. See linked discussions [2][3][4][5].
[0] https://github.com/typhoeus/ethon
[1] https://xkcd.com/1987/ (Add pipenv and poetry to the mix)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672436
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590
Curious, why didn't something like faraday worked for you?