There's a niche for something that's as sloppy-easy-to-get-started as PHP, but with a more concise/consistent/powerful language. Perhaps, a "PYP" - Python with PHP characteristics.
This is a little like that.
This is a little like that.
Someone asked on stackoverflow why PHP is so easy to learn, so I wondered how much learning curve we could cut away. Drop .erb and .haml files in a dir. Done.
I think Lua-based is very interesting. openresty is a great choice for replacing the simple glory of what Apache/PHP once was.
Although, Lapis (moonscript/Lua) adopts "Web-MVC", the way its coded is a toolkit of un-opinionated libs. You can skip the MVC stuff and just have a clean set of libs for throwing things in a directory and getting your bang for very few bucks.
http://leafo.net/lapis/ http://moonscript.org/ http://openresty.org/