Anecdotally - I find Laravel to be a much more pleasant experience than Rails (from someone who uses both daily, but has been using Laravel for much longer). Can you point out where you think the experience in Rails is better? Maybe I'm missing something...
For a few cases off the top of my head where PHP/Laravel > Ruby/Rails IMO:
- Waaay less magic in Laravel. Controllers are explicitly named, and views are explicitly rendered from methods (Unlike in Rails where everything can be done based on the naming convention of the files).
- Ruby/Rails has too many ways of doing the same thing. Laravel is quite streamlined in that regard. A big part of this is Rails abusing meta-programming IMO (for example, compare ActiveRecord vs. Eloquent).
- I find Laravel's documentation to be top-tier - I rarely have additional questions after reading the relevant sections. And there's official built-in support for a ton of 3rd party services (e.g. Stripe subcriptions).
- Some support for static types in PHP (better than nothing, but nowhere near where I'd like them to be).
- Blade > ERB IMO. Less noise + easier to read. And again, explicit calls to view.render(["var" => $var]) vs. implicit @var insntance variables tacked on to the controller.
Apart from that, PHP is:
- Less prone to memory leaks due to it spinning up a process/thread per request (which can be quite a big advantage - since it means you don't need orchestration overhead for smaller projects).
- Fast enough that performance isn't really a concern (compared to the amount of stories I've heard about migrating away from Rails due to performance problems - I've never heard the same about Laravel).
It feels to me like Rails blazed the trail for developer happiness a few years ago - but these days it seems like a bit of a relic.
For a few cases off the top of my head where PHP/Laravel > Ruby/Rails IMO:
- Waaay less magic in Laravel. Controllers are explicitly named, and views are explicitly rendered from methods (Unlike in Rails where everything can be done based on the naming convention of the files).
- Ruby/Rails has too many ways of doing the same thing. Laravel is quite streamlined in that regard. A big part of this is Rails abusing meta-programming IMO (for example, compare ActiveRecord vs. Eloquent).
- I find Laravel's documentation to be top-tier - I rarely have additional questions after reading the relevant sections. And there's official built-in support for a ton of 3rd party services (e.g. Stripe subcriptions).
- Some support for static types in PHP (better than nothing, but nowhere near where I'd like them to be).
- Blade > ERB IMO. Less noise + easier to read. And again, explicit calls to view.render(["var" => $var]) vs. implicit @var insntance variables tacked on to the controller.
Apart from that, PHP is:
- Less prone to memory leaks due to it spinning up a process/thread per request (which can be quite a big advantage - since it means you don't need orchestration overhead for smaller projects).
- Fast enough that performance isn't really a concern (compared to the amount of stories I've heard about migrating away from Rails due to performance problems - I've never heard the same about Laravel).
It feels to me like Rails blazed the trail for developer happiness a few years ago - but these days it seems like a bit of a relic.