there are two types of programming languages. there are programming languages academics and snobs swear are awesome. e.g. lisp, scheme, clojure, scala, ocaml, haskell, r, squirrel... on and on
then there are languages people actually use to build real applications that real users use: c/c++, java, javascript, php, ruby
PHP is the most used language in the history of mankind. Reading PHP gives me a boner, removing the blood from my brain and thereby improving my ability to abwaer