I would have to say that, PHP is by far my favorite programming language. I have been studying and learning every aspect of PHP for 10+ years now. I also know a few others like c++ and Python but haven't dived into them like I really wanted to.
I used to love PHP as my number one but then I rediscovered some cool stuff that JAVA can do... like keeping things in memory compared to PHP. Not that PHP cannot do that but it requires much more programming. Syntax wise, I like the object oriented format of JAVA as well compared to PHP's version
Right now, it would have to be Go, beautifully simple and wonderfully fast.
If you already know a programming language, it's fairly easy to learn and will probably look fairly familiar, while not overloading your brain with a 101 different features and idioms.
It is strongly typed though which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It can help to protect you from myself, I'm my biggest enemy, although that might slow you down when mocking features up, but it pays dividends in letting people know what types go in and what go out which the compiler enforces as law.