Same thing here. I worked with PHP and Java apps and it was just pain having to deal with the awkwardness of PHP's designs and Java's boilerplate. I actually we

Same thing here. I worked with PHP and Java apps and it was just pain having to deal with the awkwardness of PHP's designs and Java's boilerplate. I actually went into sysadmin roles because of that. Python gave me hope that there's fun development roles to be had. Nowadays the panorama for good languages, thankfully, is much better. PHP is no longer that much of a dumpster fire with modern frameworks, and Java has decided to adopt better defaults and drop the XML madness. Not to mention all the good languages that have come up (Elixir, Clojure, Rust, etc).