What's the best language for web development

I've been doing web development for a while now and I've gone through numerous languages, while I have not tinkered with all of them, I have seen and played with most.

PHP is a messy language for starters. It's attractive to any new programmers or "scripters" as I should say. It's organization is horrid but can certainly can be upgraded with the use of a framework like Zend, CakePHP, etc.

In general, PHP is a loose language that asks for ugly and horrible representations of organization and code design. It's ability to quickly develop something is quite beautiful in PHP but the after effects of it with long term success deteriorate by an exponential factor as the code base increases, generally incurring a full rewrite. PHP certainly does have a base and there are a lot of big web companies that continue to use: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc. (The list really does go on) so perhaps there is some merit to it. It certainly is a fast language as far as dynamically typed scripting languages go.

Python really takes the cake though. It's organization is beautifully integrated via imports, it's dynamically typed, and it's awesomely fast. There's a fair bit of debate on the merits of Python using common whitespace syntax as part of the programming language which in some cases people feel like it hinders versatility and creativity in coding style. I don't feel this way personally as I avidly whitespace, I think it's much nicer to incorporate this way.

Python has great parsing power which always necessary in web development and exercises true object oriented programming which PHP seems to have hacked together though they are progressing quickly to something with better design.

Python is a bit more difficult to get up and running with (not by much) but it's certainly worth the time spent.

My time with Perl generally felt almost impossible to create a large and organized project. It seems inherently messy at times although I am sure hardcore Perl advocates will cast me to hell just for saying this. Perl is great like PHP in that it's ready for you to hack together and push out.

My experience with Ruby is little to none so I'll wait for someone else to bash it! Although, with the outages twitter.com appears to have almost weekly, it seems less of a good fit for any company to use that has scalability concerns in general.

Benchmarks can be found here:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

I've never used Python but I hear great things about it. I personally think PHP is a piece of shit and very unmanageable when it comes to scalability.

I voted ASP because we are forgetting to address the corporations. When it comes to enterprise software it boils down to J2EE and .NET - aka JSP vs ASP. I don't see a JSP choice so I had to go for ASP. When it comes to high yield, mission critical systems you need the reliability, scalability and business components of enterprise libraries, thats where J2EE and .NET step in.

Any way users can add choices on the site? I'd love to see that feature.

"I personally think PHP is a piece of shit and very unmanageable when it comes to scalability. "

I don't see how you think PHP is very unmanageable when it comes to saleability. It's actually a fairly easy language to scale. I don't know if you've noticed but half the mainstream sites on the internet are running PHP and they have all scaled quite well. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Ning, Yahoo. Really, please support your statements. Many facebooks applications which have huge reach are written in PHP as well and have learnt to scale even under the facebook platform's restrictive limitations.

I believe one day PHP has the capability of becoming great as it iterates through more versions, PHP6 is on the way.

PHP is very unmanageable but any smart PHP programmer can easily make it manageable.

For the record, enterprise applications suck. There's a reason why they are called "enterprise."

Languages don't scale by themselves, they need hardware to support. You make it sound like .NET magically creates a new clustering environment or splits its data magically to another database all by its lonesome.

Don't forget, PHP is free and open source, ASP and JSP are not. Python is similar to PHP in this regard except it's far better as far as speed, organization, and design is concerned. The added bonus is that you can always write software as well and if you're forced into a .NET environment, IronPython is always available.

If you still do not believe read this article of PHP vs. JSP:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2004/07/php_scales.html

It explains to you what scalability actually means. It even explains why Friendster (a popular social network, the first I believe) moved FROM JSP to PHP.

If you think enterprise applications suck what kind of software do you think is running Wall Street, payroll & accounts receivable, even Amazon and Google back end systems? Try running that stuff on PHP and watch everything come crashing down. Sure enterprise isn't sexy but it has its place in the world.

JSP is a technology, Java is open source get your facts straight. There are many open-source tag libraries for JSP - ever heard of Spring or Struts? I don't know if you do online banking but all of that is done over an enterprise service bus. Leaving that up to PHP and kiddy scripts would put a huge damper on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Thats the keyword, enterprise isn't just for the million that Facebook and social networks serve, but the masses of people who need data 99.999999999% of the time.

"If you think enterprise applications suck what kind of software do you think is running Wall Street, payroll & accounts receivable, even Amazon and Google back end systems?"

I don't know what Wallstreet is running but can you validate they are running what you say they are? Where's the evidence.

I've interviewed with Amazon, they use their own in-house language.

Google is primarily a C++, Python shop. They do, do Java not necessarily JSP, I don't like to assume for the sake of an argument first and foremost.

"don't know if you do online banking but all of that is done over an enterprise service bus. Leaving that up to PHP and kiddy scripts would put a huge damper on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Thats the keyword, enterprise isn't just for the million that Facebook and social networks serve, but the masses of people who need data 99.999999999% of the time."

I don't know what you're talking about, there are LOTS of services not coded with Java that have great uptime. I am well aware you go to ASU and you know for fact that the course registration system there is NOT reliable, PeopleSoft IS an enterprise solution.

The only reason why enterprise software may make JSP a big player is because of major players in the field are using it. Major players are not necessarily correct.

I've used PHP for most of my web development, but thats only because I'm familiar with C++.
PHP has a huge amount of problems and is a little difficult to use, but it's a great start for anyone familiar with the C/C++/Java style.
Everything I hear about RUBY is positive, anyone that codes in it seems to love it. It's next on my line of languages to learn.

I really can't see JAVA becoming a big web development language, it's much more suitable for application programing, that's all I use it for. It's right down there with C++, languages that aren't specifically made for web development seem to fall behind the ones that are.