Looking at Ruby
I am currently looking at Ruby and Ruby on Rails for further web development and what I read so far looks very good. Check this post by the main Odeo developer: Anarchogeek: Rails, how does it scale for larger projects.
I also talked with some friends who really like it and with the language now being 10 years old, it’s starting to be mature or even is. I’d love to hear from other people out there who have worked with it, possibly coming from PHP. How was your learning curve or how do you think it will be?
I think the learning curve for most languages these days is fairly small, if you have enough experience. I’ve been programming commerically in a variety of languages since 1989, including C, FORTRAN and a number of internal-only languages like CUTLASS (used for UK powerstations). I picked up PHP in about a day, Java in about two, and PERL in about 4. By picking up I mean the time from starting to read the manual to producing practical code.
Therefore, I would not expect Ruby to pose many problems to someone with sufficient object-orientation experience.