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I find it curious that he didn't mention this or this at the end, given that they're both about a year old and both flirt with death and/or the halting problem in order to offer better debugging features.

There are a lot of very real technical reasons why people don't like PHP. The syntax and naming of its function library is inconsistent, the type coercion is irregular, and it's inconsistent about warnings vs. errors—it tends to keep executing code even when it shouldn't, potentially leading to unwanted behaviour during development if a variable isn't set or something. Reddit has a fairly active board devoted to the various problems that can occur, not all of them avoidable.

One of the most peculiar details in all of this is that PHP's original author (and, I think, but don't quote me on this, a portion of the development staff) considers himself a non-programmer; that PHP was just thrown together to simplify work. That would be okay, but it's led to a lot of security holes, bugs, and irreversible bad choices over the years, like having to use === in string parsing because false is returned by strpos() if it doesn't find anything (and false == 0). No other language requires this particular quirk.

I don't blame you for not liking Ruby. While it's a much cleaner language, it's got some very peculiar syntactical features that make a lot of people scratch their heads—most notably, there are circumstances under which return doesn't work normally, which can be very frustrating. However, there are some very creative uses of familiar syntax that, for example, make strings really easy to work with; haystack['needle'] = 'thread' is the same as $haystack = str_replace('needle', 'thread', $haystack) in PHP. I haven't used it personally, but I think the major reason Ruby projects get abandoned so much is because the people writing code in it are not experienced programmers.

Running down the list a little and hopping over JVM stuff, the other decent web languages you may want to consider are Perl and Python. Both have extremely well-developed libraries and are good with strings, so it's mostly just a question of picking "esoteric and terse" vs. "newbie-friendly and easily maintained." Decent JVM languages include JWT, Scala, and Clojure (with noir; check out that sexy beast), although JWT is probably overkill for anything smaller than Gmail.

I'm not sure who remembers the still somewhat LISP-centric Light Table IDE by Chris Granger, who was looking for kickstarter funding last year. One of the selling points of his IDE was that it's all real-time execution/evaulation, so you see your output in real time.

I'm not entirely familiar with it, but they've got Python and Javascript integration as well, and as Chris stated, any language with a dynamic runtime is a viable option.

Funny enough, he was in charge of some parts of the Visual Studio IDE, like the C# and Visual Basic 'experience', as well as managing?contributing? other bits. I wonder if this is just 3-years-later trickle down of his ideas?

I remember reading somewhere about a system that does away with the concept of "files" entirely, and the whole coding process is based around smart navigation - what's on your screen could be pulled from many different locations at once without you having to know where from - shame I can't recall where I read that exactly.

Smalltalk?

Or perhaps Light Table?

Sounds like somebody is a shoe-in for a Light Table licence.

Here's an implementation of Bret's ideas in Clojure.