My sincere opinion is that there is no perfect programming language, and most of all, there's not only one single language that "would hold the future". PHP will have a long life from now on in web development, I believe, for the simple fact that it's made for this purpose. Of course, there is also C#, Java and others, but they are not made for "web use only", their creators had other things in mind, too, when creating them (like desktop applications and such). Ruby code looks like junk to me, personally, and their web server (webricks or such) acts like crap when dealing with alot of traffic, from what I've heard. Java is another language that will live many many years from now on, and so is C/C++ (although my preference is Java over C++). So, I'll go for PHP and Java. Oh, and also the markup languages (like HTML, XML) and SQL (ppl will always need databases and internet websites).

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