It's no secret that I've been a user and fan of the Ruby programming language for all of my career. I picked it up in 2012 after a high school friend I had introduced to Linux live CDs and I reconnected after I graduated, and he introduced me to Ruby and Sinatra. From that point on it was almost instant love.
I had some experience in high school writing PHP pre-object oriented PHP, so the scripts had been messy and the code never felt great to me back then, so I dropped it and had a non-programming time for awhile. Eventually once I found ruby I kept with it, until I got my first Rails job in 2016.
A few years ago I would have strictly said "Ruby only for me, please". Nowadays it's so incredibly cheap to write (with your LLM) any language even if you're not an expert in that language, it's not uncommon for Swift, Java/Kotlin, Ruby, JavaScript, Rust and other languages to cross my GitHub.
Yesterday I actually used PHP and Laravel for the first time in at least 3-4 years. It's not that bad! Laravel in many ways is everything I loved about Rails and then some, I wanted a package to preview my emails the app sent and I remembered Telescope. Holy shit that included requests, cache and more too?!
Laravel really cares about the developers writing it, and now agents. That's not to say Rails doesn't fully, but I've not see that level of built-for-laravel developers mapped to Ruby on the same level by the creators of Rails. I was also wow'd by the out of the box TUI when you run composer run dev. If you're a Laravel dev you might be like "yeah, so?" but for us Ruby devs, we often need to chain a few packages together to get a similar experience you have out of the box.
Different teams will have different priorities for focuses, but it's clear there's a lot of love for the craft in Laravel and those who write it. It's another datapoint that in 2026+ it's a great idea to diversify your stack, try new frameworks out, see what you love and what you don't. Maybe you find a great idea and bring it back to your first-choice framework. Maybe you choose to pick this other framework for another project down the road. That's not a bad thing.
For me, I'm no longer defaulting to Rails and Ruby anymore just because I've always done it that way. Each project will get a look at the language and framework to write it in, and see if it makes sense to use Ruby for that or not. Heck, who knows? Maybe I'll choose Laravel more.