> The bad things people talk about PHP (bad cruft in naming of methods, kludgy parts) are not relevant if it takes a few hours/days to learn that -- and if a good coding standard can limit yourself to a subset of the language. You need to do that for all languages anyway. (See JavaScript.)

Javascript is by no means a good language. I think "needs a coding standard and a few hours/days to learn which parts to avoid" is a point against a language - not necessarily reason to rule it out entirely, but a mark in the negative column. There are plenty of languages where this need for a standard doesn't seem to arise, because the obvious way to do things is good enough (e.g. Python).

> But: One big red flag would be if the language proponents are language war fanatics that vote down criticism of their language/framework while attacking all competition. You probably know which ones I talk about.

That's a terrible reason to make any decision. It reminds me of the guy who wouldn't listen to U2 because he didn't like their fans. If you avoid languages that're used by idiots you'll find yourself on a treadmill where you're constantly moving from incomplete language to incomplete language, because as soon as a language gets good enough, idiots will find it and use it.