I have been working with PHP steadily over the last year, and, coming from a Rails background (learned it at General Assembly), I used to hate the "ugly" syntax

I have been working with PHP steadily over the last year, and, coming from a Rails background (learned it at General Assembly), I used to hate the "ugly" syntax, weird method calls, and strictness of PHP (missing a semicolon can be damnable offense in the eyes of the compiler). Ruby to me seemed a lot more flexible, but over time, after hacking at PHP, I have come to appreciate it as a language that gets the job done. My preference is still with Ruby on Rails; however, I have been thinking of using a more lightweight framework like Sinatra. I am still impressed with how flexible and expressive Ruby can be. Alongside bash, it has really become one of my favorite languages to work with particularly for scraping/writing automations. Would love to get into Node, but the idea of javascript on the back-end hurts my head. All I have used Node for is for basic utilities like uglify-js and minifier. Been hacking on Angular and Mithril on the front end, I love javascript as a front end language, but still haven't wrapped my head around Node. Javascript isn't too far off syntax-wise from PHP, but my struggle with Node is how to organize the codebase as well as understanding a clean separation of concerns when it comes to front-end and back-end code. Might be off topic, but I am really excited to see how the GraalVM is going to impact languages like Javascript and Ruby.