It is interesting to think of a language specifically designed for web apps as different from a general-purpose language. This would of never occurred to me unl

It is interesting to think of a language specifically designed for web apps as different from a general-purpose language. This would of never occurred to me unless I only knew PHP. I suspect if you tried to make a good web app language it would look like ruby or python, and really good web app language -- one very scalable -- look like haskell or scheme. But to answer your question directly there are too many benefits to mention and they are language specific. I think transitioning to ruby and rails environment would be rewarding. I myself like Scala much better than ruby even though it's static typing is painful at times, and choose the rails-like framework Play! (http://scala.playframework.org http://scala.playframework.org). The front page shows you examples of the language expressiveness.