Syntactically, the languages are not all that similar. It's probably closer to Python.

As much as people abhor PHP in programming communities (and I get that sentiment), I find RoR to be a far, far worse platform to build upon.

PHP is a kludge. You'd be surprised to know that world is made of kludges with a few elegant hacks thrown in and not the other way round.

Performance hacks are always kludges. Can you live without them ?

Honest question, should I waste my time worrying about the "What makes syntax elegant" than working with the existing kludge ? What makes that time well spent ?

Why shouldn't I seek beauty in output and look for a programming language that get's me the output quickly ?

I guess the best tools are ones which help you produce output quickly whilst being conductive to elegance and readability, Ruby's terse syntax and features like blocks are an attempt at this.

It also depends on how big your project will get and how long it will need to be maintained for.

There are plenty of projects I have seen where chunks of extremely bad code have been pumped out to create a 1.0 with a giant list of features. Of course such code becomes increasingly costly to maintain or modify without breaking. In many cases they would have been better off cutting features from the 1.0 (most features are unused anyway) and concentrating on quality.

No. I wouldn't. I'm an electrical engineer by training.

> Performance hacks are always kludges.

Not always. Sometimes they bring out some inner beauty in the code that was previously hidden. But, again, sometimes they don't.

> Honest question, should I waste my time worrying about the "What makes syntax elegant" than working with the existing kludge ?

It depends on your priorities. If you were a poet, would you be more worried about making good poetry or selling more books?

> Why shouldn't I seek beauty in output and look for a programming language that get's me the output quickly ?

Again, it depends on what is your output and how you relate with the fact that the thing generating that output is a horrible mess.

I agree. Electrical, Electronics, Civil, NASA aka Real Engineering will not have more kludges.

Phone Radiation / Drainage Systems have a few "Oh well I'll just leave it here ..."

But what about medicine, law, newspapers ? Are they not part of the real messy world ?

I agree to be a kludge worker and an idealist part time poet :) (pragmatic choice)

My impression was that Ruby is much closer to Perl than Python.

* The languages are very different, syntactically. Ruby's blocks and enumerators really don't have an analog in PHP, and they'll take some getting used to. There's also some pretty deep philosophical differences in what the two languages mean by "class". That said, they sit at about the same abstraction layer, so line by line the complexity and flow shouldn't be that big of a jump.

* Rails is more like, say, Zend Framework than raw PHP. It enforces an MVC layout on your code and does what looks at first like a lot of magic to figure out which template files correspond to which pages. When you're starting out the rails scaffold generators are your friend.

* Ruby's standard library has a lot less in it than PHPs, so no XML parser or SQL client out of the box. Gems, and bundler in particular, makes it much easier to add third party code, though. You'll spend a lot more time bikeshedding over which third-party library to use, but the competition generally leads to more pleasant APIs in the long run.

* Ruby convention is to have more files and less code per file. A lot of your template files will only end up being three or four lines long. It's honestly easier in the long run, but get an editor that supports that workflow (multiple tabs, fuzzy file open, find-in-project, etc).

* RoR is almost completely independent of Apache for configuration. You get to move all the logic that was in .htaccess into ruby code in your app somewhere, and you get much more freedom over defining what you want your URLs to look like. You'll need to familiarize yourself with a concept called reverse proxying to figure out how this works in production, though.

* Not strictly ruby, but the rails asset pipeline is magic. Once you get used to it you'll never want to do frontend coding without it.

Oh well, another challenge, another achievement. Thanks Vec!

I think CURL is handled in a more abstract way in Rails, but I haven't really gotten to work with Http clients in Rails yet.

Even though PHP and Ruby (and therefore Rails) have little in common, I think you can still learn the Rails fundamentals quickly. Check out Michael Hartl's excellent Rails Tutorial. Also, Ryan Bates' Railscasts are a fantastic resource.

Php .net is so well doc'd with an example for almost every function/feature that it made it EXTREMELY easy to pick up. Does Ruby have something similar (really hope it's not -> ruby-lang.org, reminds me of w3), not too keen to Michael Hartl's just cause I'd have to buy it.

I much prefer Ruby's documentation to PHP's. Especially when it comes to 3rd party code, I don't have one gem in my current Rails project that isn't very nicely documented. Compare that to the PHP I work on during the day and almost all the 3rd party libs have no documentation.

Coming from PHP where basically nothing happens unless you make it happen (for better and very often for worse), I found Rails confusing once you got beyond easy Active Record calls and into using gems. There are tons of add-ons that do useful things, but they do a lot of their work behind the scenes assuming adherence to certain conventions—which, I know, is a strength as well as a weakness, I get it. But that increases the difficulty of jumping past the stage of following a tutorial and just installing one persons collection of gems, scripts and other helpers.

If you write Object Oriented PHP and use a framework with strong OOP principals you probably will have no problem learning Rails.

If you've used MVC before, and you understand the role of a Model, View, Controller, data bindings, ORM, etc. then you should have no problem learning Rails.

If all you know is PHP and it's control structures, and you expect your file to be interpreted every time you visit a URL, then you will probably have more difficultly learning Rails.

It would be helpful to know what you love about PHP.