Javascript has become a nice language. You can't avoid it in webdev. Rich ecosystem. Languages like Typescript, Elm, Purescript, etc. are close.

Ruby is very practical, has everything, very consistent and clean. PHP is not consistent and not clean.

Golang is fast and the simplest language that is actually used in the industry. It is dramatically simpler than C. It is the fastest.

Python is like Ruby, but even more practical because it has ML and math, whereas Ruby does not.

PHP has no place in this world.

Perl, Python, Ruby, and ASP.NET are all great webapp languages; but Perl is old, Ruby is heavy, and .NET is Microsoft - however PHP developers have no reason not switch to a real OOP language like Python and save themselves from a wheelbarrow-load of trouble.

I've used PHP for a while -- a few years -- and haven't developed a particular loathing for it. That's saying something, since I'm disgusted by most of the tools I'm forced to use.

It's certainly capable enough and isn't hard to use. It's also more ubiquitous, and therefore arguably more portable, than Ruby or Python, although dealing with differences between PHP versions is a pretty royal pain.

Pretty much any reasonably skilled programmer can do a job in PHP without too much trouble. You'll get more cred for using Python or Ruby though.

Ruby or python is probably the best choice, and I personally favor python.

It has some strengths: Big library (not as big or as high quality as CPAN, so if library support is what you need, go for Perl), a lot of example code (but it's mostly horrible quality...even good examples are pretty bad in spots), and really easy deployment. So, if you're building an Open Source project that you want a lot of people to use, it's a great choice--PHP is available on every hosting server on the planet. Or, if you need a "blank-plus-this-widget" you can probably find the "blank" already written in PHP and then build your "widget" on top.

But, if you're starting from scratch, why commit yourself to working with a shoddy language for the months or years it'll take to finish? There are good imperative languages out there for web app development: Ruby and Python, in particular. Though the frameworks craze for these languages are partly to bridge the gap that they have with PHP (they're all missing a "view" layer for the web, because PHP is a reasonably powerful, if ugly, template system), and a lot of the other crap just makes things ugly...they get built for one particular application and then stretched for general-purpose use, and in the stretching they get a bit misshapen and hard to fit into any specific task.

Anyway, Ruby and Python are pretty and reasonably consistent languages that are nice to work with. PHP is neither. Perl...well, it ain't necessarily pretty, but CPAN is hard to beat when you just want to get the job done...and you can treat it as a functional language pretty effectively, which is all the rage around these parts (and you'll probably want to after you see the bolted on object system).

I remember switching to PHP for three reasons about 9 years ago. I cycled through Perl, ColdFusion, Java Server Pages, and ASP JScript before getting to it.

1. It was the most accessible free alternative to costly platforms (ColdFusion, MS ASP) or more strict / difficult to configure platforms (Perl, JSP). Error checking was as simple as ASP/JSP and starting up was as simple as paying for a cheap LAMP server that would run it out of the box.

2. It had the largest set of online documentation for both the language itself and tutorials / code examples. This was one of the biggest unavoidable draws to the language. The community was huge and still is to this day although documentation is much more evenly distributed across other languages now.

3. PHP may be one ugly beast but it does pre-package practically every piece of functionality you could ask for within it. I'm not sure I have ever liked the look of the code but there was something magical about being able to grab remote server code via file_get_contents for the first time. It was so damn easy!

If I were to suggest a platform today I would probably have to go with Python. It has all of the same advantages that PHP had in the past but has the added benefit of being better designed and applicable to more than web programming. Ruby would be my second choice simply because the environment setup is a bit more complicated still, although the language is the most beautiful in my opinion.

This extreme flexibility coupled with mature libraries makes web app development ridiculously easy. For a complex application that starts at ground zero I would probably recommend Ruby or Python but really even that decision is 50-50. We've faced this crossroads 3 times in the last couple months and 2/3 we've gone with PHP over Python, and not just cos of familiarity.

For any existing app, it's probably already in PHP or something worse like ColdFusion, so migrating it to "good" PHP 5.x is usually the only logical step.

That said threading, namespaces, sickening magic and the whole haystack/needle needle/haystack game SUCK. But you can get everything done quick and everything will scale and if you need to change it you know you always can without tearing down a house of cards so ... I for one don't mind it, in fact I quite like PHP and the PHP ecosystem.

(And then, the hype and FUD is quite heavy on the ground, re Perl. Not least on HN.)

The headaches in a web app are usually at the user interface level (DOM/CSS/Javascript) and at the systems level (there's a bug in fast cgi! MySQL imploded!) and language choice gluing it all together is mostly a matter of taste. People with taste overestimate its importance. You can get pretty far in the internet biz with no taste (MySpace... originally done in COLD FUSION).

That said, the most tasteful option out of your choices is Python.

Perl is similar to PHP. It's not nearly as bad - in fact it's a great language in many ways - but it's also old. It's about as widely adopted as it's ever going to be, and it doesn't pick up new features as quickly as it once did. The syntax is also a bit quirky. :) Unless you want to work on Perl codebases, I'd recommend staying away, not because it's bad but because it's not really good enough.

Haskell isn't really suitable for scripts or simple webapps (your listed use cases). It's a wonderful language, and knowing it will make you a better programmer and a better person...but it doesn't do what you want. Stay away. :)

Better choices for you would be:

Python/Ruby: Flip a coin and pick one. Both are awesome, but they also have a lot of overlap; you won't regret either choice. They're both excellent for writing short scripts, webapps, etc. They are objectively MUCH better languages for these purposes than PHP, and at least marginally better than Perl. They also have very serious market share (which makes it easy to find tutorials, help, example code, open source projects to contribute to, etc.)

Javascript: With the advent of Node, it's a decent choice for what you want. And it's still the omnipresent language for client-side programming. Not as mainstream as Python/Ruby, but still pretty popular and widely adopted - but it's not completely mature, and new and interesting ideas are still popping up.

Something else: If those options don't spark any interest - or if you already know them - you might look farther afield. Lua and Clojure are both interesting options, in very different ways. As someone who already knows Python and JS pretty well, Clojure would probably be top of my list of "languages to learn". (I just wish it wasn't JVM based...oh well.)

I'm using Ruby now and I would never go back.

Here's my rough order of language preference for server-side languages that I have experience in: Ruby > Python > C# > PHP > Perl > Visual Basic > Java > C

So while you might like ruby/python because it's prettier or because PHP 4 was awful, the idea that one of them is a better web language is totally laughable. If you asked me to define a language better than PHP for web applications, I would have you a long list not even considering python and ruby.

To folk claiming PHP is to programming what white bread is to a healthy colon, I say that you are the inferior programmer for not being able to love it.

My claim is this: PHP (and most certainly Perl) are to web application development what paint is to painting.

Web application frameworks written in Ruby and Python are to web programming what paint by numbers is to painting.

I'd put PHP somewhere under the middle of the list of languages/ecosystems I'd like to work in again (RoR, specifically, though not Ruby generally; non-TypeScript JavaScript; and gnarly AbstractFactoryImpl-style Java are all probably worse than it, IMO, and of course PHP deep in anything like Wordpress is pretty miserable) and I like Go quite a bit, but there's no denying that if performance is a top criterion PHP should probably be on your short list when choosing a language/ecosystem, and if PHP's not going to cut it then probably no scripting languages are on your list, and you're very likely looking real hard at C++.

I worked with Php for a couple of years and I can tell you that I absolutely thought the language was a melting pot of some great ideas with a huge bunch of WTF form the very beginning. In my opinion Php as a language is archaic and the only reason to use it now is because it makes sense for your team (because that's what your team has experience with). That being said, a good developer gets great stuff out the door regardless of what language they use to do so. Hell one of best developers I know is a Php junkie - with whom I always ended up having a slight language war with. The funny thing is that even tough he was the strongest Php advocate I know, he is now using Python for everything and agrees that it's a much better language.

Now I work almost exclusively with Ruby for webdevelopment (and also for a big part of my server scripts now that I mention it) because it just makes sense. The code is a lot more maintainable and scalable, though this is because it's generally the case that out of a batch of Ruby developers you will probably get more 'good' developers than out of a batch of Php developers with the same amount of people. It's my experience that its easy to get 50 Php developers, out of which only a couple are actually good ones, while if you get 10 Ruby devs, at least half are competent.

This rant is getting long so I'll just leave you with a thought. If the only developers you can get right now are Php devs, it makes sense to do your project in Php; however, if it's possible for you to get your hands on some Ruby or Python developers, you really can't go wrong by choosing either over Php, specially since doing so will generally have the benefits of a faster, better, and more maintainable codebase.

I see the attitude to C as analogous to PHP in the web programming sphere. Everyone complains about PHP. And yet despite all the criticism to avoid PHP, the overwhelming majority of server-side web apps are written in PHP. Not Python or Ruby or Lua or some other language. Some estimates state PHP makes up 80% of server-side web code.

Why haven't these other languages displaced PHP? Because none of them can match PHPs simplicity and ease of deployment. Not Python or Ruby or Lua or any other language.

And of what of C? It's a similar scenario. Where is the fast, strongly-typed, low-memory programming language with a friendly readable syntax for low and high-level programming? Does it exist? Is Rust that language?