On RubySource.com there's a recent post with a bit of a confession from an ex-PHP developer who's moved over to Ruby about some of he is experiences in making the shift and why he's a convert now.

I've been a PHP developer for nearly a decade, and in January this year I started developing in Ruby. While initially a sceptic, I'm now a convert - and I'm here to share my experiences with you. [...] I'd like to think of myself as a fairly good PHP developer, and the idea of moving to Rails was both scary and exciting. [...] In Ruby's defence, these are frustrations that are well made up for with the delights of finding out how easy other things are to do - and any learning process has its frustrations.

He compares a bit of code that would take a list of email addresses and pull out the domain parts of each, grabbing only the unique ones. He includes some PHP code (using anonymous functions in PHP 5.3) to get the job done and compares it to the Ruby method that's a bit more fluid and readable. He talks about some of his frustrations during the learning process of creating code like this and includes his steps as he evolved through it.