Sort of OT, and I basically haven't used PHP or Ruby, but I want to reply to your
comment about Javascript.
In my experience, Javascript as a language has more to recommend it than a lot of people give it credit for. It has full support for dynamic typing, closures, resizeable arrays, associative arrays, a very flexible object system, and built-in regular expression support. Sort of like Perl, one might say. Now, Javascript also has some dark ugly corners, and it doesn't surprise me that it hasn't taken off in areas other than its one specialty of client-side web applications, but still.