What is the best programming language for web development and why?

Gmail is written in Java.
Wikipedia is written in PHP.
Many parts of google.com are written in Python.
Slashdot is written in Perl.
Twitter is written in Ruby.
Stackoverflow is written in C#.
The list goes on…
As you can see, there is no best language, a language is only what you make of it.

Excellent response. You can tell a lot about a programmer’s wisdom and professional maturity by the way they answer these types of questions — and the more of a non-answer it is (like sork’s), the better.

Nothing is more dull and pointless than programmers arguing about which languages are “better” or berating languages they don’t know for being “bad”. Every language is great in many ways and awful in many others. If you can’t tell me why your favorite language sucks, you don’t know it well enough.