At the end of the day any of the languages listed above get the job done for all but the most demanding of applications (if you are building the next google, you'll want to look at something more scaleable like Go or Haskell). - PHP is ubiquitous and can do almost anything you want if you can get past how weird the syntax is sometimes. - Ruby is a breeze to develop on when you use something like Rails. I hear its slow although I can't speak from personal experience. - Python is fairly easy to pick up on syntax wise and gives a lot of power right out the box - NodeJS (my personal favorite) has a vast community and excellent tooling support. It's probably the easiest one to pick up since everyone knows javascript but it has the downside of making it very easy to write awful code if you don't know what you are doing.