What does the HN community use as far as Python, PHP and Ruby development work? freelance or enterprise.
is it worth spending the money on JetBrains products such as RubyMine, PyCharm, PhpStorm or should I stick with NetBeans or Eclipse for scripting languages work for mainly PHP and Python freelance work.<p>In particular PhpStorm vs Netbeans vs Eclipse
I'd say you should definitely download the trials and work in them for at least a couple of days. I personally am a big fan of the JetBrains products. I was fortunate enough last year when they had the 'end of the world' special to grab RubyMine, Webstorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ Idea and Resharper for less than $150. I honestly haven't worked with the IDE's much, but from my experience they are pretty good. I wouldn't bet much on the plugins per se, but I'd say you're in pretty good hands if you choose to work with an IDE specifically designed around a particular language/framework since a lot of languages are very opinionated about development (ex. Rails, Golang).
I use PyCharm for Python development and I like it quite a lot. I find the code completion and debugger to be the most useful features. At $99 for an individual it is not terribly expensive and well worth it.
I use Sublime Text 2 for rails development. I've heard good things about RubyMine, but I'm content with sublime plus a console for development, deployment, and source control.