The #1 rule that trumps all, no matter how small or big your project: Use whatever facilitates your work.

Sometimes you need to get things done quickly, sometimes you need to hire a lot of people cheaply/easily, sometimes you need a project to scale. In each of these cases, you may want to use a different tool. For something that's your side project, you probably just want to be able to get work done effectively and enjoy what you're doing. Pick that tool that you most enjoy working with, in that case.

For me, I default to Ruby (and I haven't touched Rails for work in 2 years!). I find it to be a joy to work with. I expect that later, as a I grow as a developer, this will become Elixir and/or Erlang. Sometimes I have to work in Python, because that makes sense for the project. I find it a bit of a slog, but it gets the job done and lets me move on to other things.

If you are a developer learning the ropes, I couldn't recommend a better language than Ruby. Your skills will translate. You will find work. The places that hire junior developers that only care that you know their stack aren't worth your time.

Most of the people that have publicly roasted Rails were wrong, for one reason or another, by the way (especially that Twitter blog post...). Too often, people are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The best advice I can give you after that first rule is that you should ignore what people say and just get your work done. That's the thing that differentiates people who stay working in this field and those who don't.

Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.

Ruby and Rails are "boring" because they are mature and do their job extremely well, so the cutting-edge devs that helped get them there got bored and moved on to other newer ecosystems.

If you are more interested in getting the project done fast and efficiently and you don't mind doing it someone else's way, then RoR is a good choice.

If you like to do things your own way, then Rails will probably frustrate you because it is very opinionated on how things are done. You can override everything, but some people's personality is more suited for the node.js world that is far less of a framework and more of an ecosystem of libraries.

These are 2 popular posts that will help you figure out if RoR is a personality fit for you:

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...

https://medium.com/@timbuchwaldt/rails-is-boring-thats-great...

Django, a highly competitive web framework. With great extensions like Django REST Framework. Assets with django-webpack-loader. So on. It may not be as good as Laravel or Rails, but they're all really active.

But the thing that makes Python best is the web framework is where it begins, not where it ends:

Want text analysis? NLTK or spaCy

Data? Pandas, numpy, pytables

Want more analysis? scikit-learn, tensorflow, theano.

Solid language standards? PEP8 and PEP257 makes most python code you see in open source very conformant

Test framework? pytest. And its plugins. tox for testing against a matrix of python versions/settings (kinda like Travis).

Handling environments + packages easily? pipenv

Multiple python versions? pyenv

Editor integration? Jedi + python-mode for VIM, VSCode, Atom, Python

Images / Graphics? pillow

Super-powered REPL? ptpython

Deployment? Fabric, Ansible, Saltstack

Documentation? Sphinx, Docutils

Want C/C++ integration/performance? pybind11, cython, CFFI, swig

Mobile dev? kivy (though I wouldn't say it's the best yet, when I tried it, setup was easier than react-native)

And that's just scratching the surface. Python has high quality, permissively-licensed libraries, with solid documentation. A lot of the plugins I mentioned above for handling data use C-level speedups. Of these, tensorflow, and Theano can use GPU speedups.

Rails is fantastic. I like guard and the asset pipeline. But I just learned to use GNU Make's "$ make -j task1 task2" and django-webpack-loader. I also hear good things about Laravel in PHP.

There's not a lot of new stuff coming out of these frameworks because of how mature they are.

Both languages/frameworks are comparable. Your end product will not be very different regardless which route you take. Both languages and frameworks will be maintained 10 years from now. The job market for both will exist 5+ years from now.

Pick one you like and get to work!

Part of the reason I suspect is the development cultural difference brought by language barriers. Without sound development, it surely will struggle to become better than alternatives.

https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/4570470

[0] https://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr/metaprogramming-ruby

I program in Ruby right now for work but am comfortable switching to Python. There are plenty of Ruby positions available, we've hired 5 or so Junior Engineers out of Rails/JavaScript bootcamps. It's just that Python has the data science and machine learning positions in addition to web development.

http://phoenixframework.org/

It has some Rails roots, so you might like it.

1) the language you know best

2) the language you most want to learn

Only you can decide on which has a higher priority.

Anyway, I just started using CherryPy for a new project and would like to recommend it. I had actually used it around 10 years ago and hadn't given it much thought until recently, but it's quite simple and nice for REST APIs.

All this with the caveats that: I think both languages have advantages and disadvantages and I think knowing more languages is better than knowing fewer or one.

If you are intending to collaborate then python might be a better choice as its more popular.

Just a different take. Either one is great.

I also think that once you learn Python, a lot of other languages' syntax (such as Go and C# for me) becomes more approachable.

Is this sentiment common? It might be just my personal echo chamber but I've often heard the opposite stance, i.e. people saying they hate Rails because of all the "magic" but at the same time they like Ruby as a language because of its flexibility.

All of my ETL pipelines are built in Ruby and I wouldn't have it another way. From a development, support and deployment persective, Jekyll is hands-down the best "web framework" I've ever worked with. If you need to build websites that don't need sessions/accounts, there isn't a better tool. NGINX's SSI module fills in some (tiny) gaps.

Ruby's a great language with a healthy set of tools. It's just not popular among people making CRUD apps right now.

To most folks though, unless they're already Ruby developers (AND not a Rails shop), Ruby and Rails might as well be the same thing.

we have switched to python for our FaaS but only because of lack of Ruby support from AWS lambda.

I've found php is somewhat slightly more verbose and fewer data structures seems to make php code easier to maintain for other people than perl and java (which I also maintain...).

Personally, I'm a big fan of Rails and Flask and use both on a regular basis.

You may also want to give this a read:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/it-doesnt-matter-what-web-fra...