As a self-taught programmer I used to hail PHP as God's gift to mankind until I recruited a team and attempted rapid deployments. The language is just poorly designed compared to Ruby and Python. In face it can encourage some really bad habits for soon-to-be engineers.

On a side note, Coffeescript is one of my fav for it's ease of fixing common bugs concerning global variables, semicolons and equality comparisons. But I am a little turned of by its overblown hype on simplied syntax by its fanboys. They need to realize that, sometimes typing function in JS is just as easy as typing -> in most IDEs.