Scripting languages on my mind

It’s late 2014. Here’s all the scripting languages I’ve tried/thought of trying out this year for backend web development.

PHP

• I really like the Laravel framework
• Community and ecosystem is growing in a good way (PHP The right way, Packagist, HHVM)
• I have the most experience with this language and its ecosystem (MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, WordPress, nginx, Apache etc)

But:

• Language has some some dumb function names that won’t go away for a long time
• xdebug needs a heavy IDE with debugging features to be easy to use (like Netbeans)

Javascript + Node.js

• Skills with Javascript will not go out of demand any time soon
• node-inspector is great for debugging

But:

• Does it work well with relational DBs?
• No leading web application platform – still have to assemble something like Laravel out of many small packages from NPM

Python

• I like the syntax
• I hear good things about Django

But:

• More complex to deploy then PHP or Node

Ruby

• Because Ruby on Rails was cool in 2007 when I was buried in ActionScript 3.0 and I wonder what I missed out on

But:

• Lots of overlap with other languages I know. Would I learn anything new other than syntax?

Everything here is OOP. Maybe I should try out something functional in 2015.