PHP has served me well, and still does.
I was just reading this:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I'm not sure who wrote it, but I got there by reading an article by Jeff Atwood (for whom I have a good amount of respect), and which seems to support the same opinion.

Here is a great snippet from the linked article:

Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere.
@fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');
What will it do?

If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. (How? No idea.)
Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in php.ini.
Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
But not if the right error_reporting level isn’t set.
If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.

I can’t tell how this innocuous function call will behave without consulting compile-time flags, server-wide configuration, and configuration done in my program. And this is all built in behavior.

Now I was kind of reluctant to agree with the author, up to there, but I have to concede that this is one of the major problems with PHP, and the "scream" thing is what already tipped me over the edge and now I realize that I need to start looking for something else. But what?

I'm not looking for a finished, miracle drop-in solution or answer, but I'm up for receiving feedback. I know about Perl (not very excited about the syntax and the fact that Perl originally was - and still is a great text processing langage), python (how do I set it up?), ruby (I don't want to have to deal with rails...), C# (Proprietary? Visual Studio?? Microsoft!? Having to learn everything from scratch?). What I'm looking for is something that can be used as a template language in a straight-forward way (like PHP), but would be a more consistent, elegant and modern system all-round. It also would ideally share some common ground with PHP, or be simple enough, so that I can get up to speed rather quickly.

Anyone here has ideas or something to add?