I'm a bit surprised that you put PHP in that list. My current workload is in it, and a relatively modern version of it, so maybe that surprise will turn around soon, but I've always felt that PHP was more obnoxious than even C to read and write.

Granted, I started out on LISP. My version of "easy to read and write" might be slightly masochistic. But I love Perl and Python and Javascript are definitely "you can jump in and get shit done if you have worked in most languages. It might not be idiomatic, but it'll work"...