I have a rather odd problem. I love the practicality of PHP - specifically that I can fairly safely assume that on any random server I'll have access to the MySQL libraries, and that I can go between PHP/HTML with <?
and ?>
. That said, I find the language atrocious - Ruby and Python are considerably more expressive, yet since they're not web-specific, they lack both of those features - at least last I used them both.
So my question is, is there some way to get the practicality of PHP from Ruby or Python (specifically the two issues I mentioned)? If not, is there some other language that doesn't feel like a C/C++ parser gone wrong?