The php|architect blog has a very interesting posting this morning dealing with the ever-present war: Is my language really better than yours?

The "my language is better than yours" diatribe is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication among developers in existence. I can remember these discussions as far back as I remember knowing at least another person capable to write software in one form or another. [...] In the end, all procedural web languages share the same traits. They all have functions, or subroutines, or however you want to call them. Most of them share the same (or very similar) data types, including variants. Conditional constructs are virtually identical, even though the syntax changes slightly.

He makes a very valid point later on when discussing the comparison of the langauges - that when comparing, you must compare between platforms, not languages. A successful platform provides a library that not only offers functionality in many different areas, but that does so in a way that makes it easy for the programmer to achieve his goals.