Sorry, I'm going to get flamed but what's so wrong with Perl? PHP, the Personal Hypertext Processor was built on it, so some of the both the ugliness and utility leaked out from Perl origins. I've been using and maintaining Perl, including some -big- codebases since about 1997 and it's still a good language both general purpose and for the web. CPAN [which is both good and bad, huge amount of choice and huge amount of variable quality] makes it extremely productive as well. On the other hand, as a young person I supported APL for quite a while, so I have a weakness for very terse, rich languages.