Modern frameworks and platforms have incorporated and improved a lot of ideas (some would consider) made popular by PHP. Spend some time getting to know Rails for instance and you'll find that none of the problems you just described apply, and they've solved the same problems -- but better.
No need to manually escape strings, no build system, 4 different JSON libraries!? Seamless (you don't even need to call it most of the time) to_json. The list goes on.
Yes, you have to know about appropriate libraries to use Ruby for webapps, just like you have to know about the functions available in PHP. It's fortunate that PHP has some of that core stuff built in, because it's package manager blows. If I need to encode json I just incant `gem install json` (but it's probably installed already, or maybe I would have to start right at the beginning with `gem search -r json`?) and call `to_json`.
The point is, use what makes you productive. Not being 'designed for web scripting' is meaningless today.
No need to manually escape strings, no build system, 4 different JSON libraries!? Seamless (you don't even need to call it most of the time) to_json. The list goes on.
Yes, you have to know about appropriate libraries to use Ruby for webapps, just like you have to know about the functions available in PHP. It's fortunate that PHP has some of that core stuff built in, because it's package manager blows. If I need to encode json I just incant `gem install json` (but it's probably installed already, or maybe I would have to start right at the beginning with `gem search -r json`?) and call `to_json`.
The point is, use what makes you productive. Not being 'designed for web scripting' is meaningless today.