I agree there is some language snobbery. However, I moved from PHP to Ruby and love it.
My two biggest gripes with PHP:
1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.
2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.
My two biggest gripes with PHP:
1) No standard package management system. I worked with some VERY smart developers at a PHP-only company, but nearly every part of their complex system was coded in-house, from the ORM up. Rubyists practically never code things that are available as well-tested gems, saving tons of effort, debugging, and training new people. That's a huge boost to Getting Things Done.
2) Little discoverability. If you can't remember the string method you want, you'll have to Google - and make sure you notice the order of the arguments. In Ruby, you can do `'foo'.methods.sort` and see all the methods available on strings. Since it's OO, you don't have to pass in the string itself, so there are fewer arguments to know in the first place.