I left PHP in 2005 because it felt like I wasn't learning anything anymore. At the time I thought it was the warts, but in retrospect it's definitely the community. The problem is that every good piece of open source PHP is drowned out by a hundred shitty spaghetti projects.

When I picked up Rails, everything clicked right away because it directly addressed so many of the shortcomings of how things were done in PHP. Digging deeper in the Ruby community I found a genuine passion for pulling in great ideas and advancing the state of the art. Ruby has shitty projects too, but the good stuff is more prominent and easier to find.

After 5 years with Ruby I'm not particularly eager to leave, but I do feel the urge to pick up another language to expand my horizons once more. Preferably something with a high density of good ideas, like Haskell.

I know PHP has evolved and is quite capable as a language, but the only way I would touch it again is if I was working on a project that was interesting for bigger reasons (eg. Facebook).