I've never worked with PHP, but I work, aside of Perl, with Ruby. Languages has always to do with matter of taste, of course. A second point of consideration is what addon software is available. Ruby and Perl both offer plenty of free stuff (on Rubyforge and CPAN, respectively). My impression is that you can get at the moment still more goodies for Perl than for Ruby. OTOH, for web programming, there is a very nice framework available for Ruby which is called "Ruby on Rails", which eases web development a lot. I don't know whether there exists plans to re-implement Rails for other languages.