An octopus that's made by nailing 4 extra legs to a dog.

Does pretty much anything quite well (but not brilliantly). The chicken-tikka-masala of the coding world, if you will.

It's very similar to C++ but platform independent and with fantastic documentation. For standalone application development I think it's hard to beat.
Early versions ran about 20 times slower than C++ due to running within their own runtime environment but Java 1.6 is only about half the speed of C++ which is a hit I'm well prepared to take.
Also the JAR package functionality allows application packages and dependencies to be wrapped up into a file that can be simply executed on most platforms.

---

---

Arguably one of the most technically advanced BASICs ever made, QBASIC (technically an IDE for QuickBASIC) introduced subroutines to BASIC, although the implementation is fairly horrific and requires switching view between subroutines. Mouse command is lacking (although obviously implementable with POKE commands). Line numbers are supported, but unnecessary for the first time. The debugger is an interesting innovation, allowing breakpoints and step-through program execution. User defined data types are also available for the first time. Overall, it's fairly easy to use once you've got the hang of the strange pre-mouse-days controls.

QBASIC comes with two wonderful example games (and one money manager program), Nibbles and Gorrilas, both of which are clones of other games done a million other times, nibbles being one of the best multiplayer implementations of the 'snake' concept ever made. It's also very easy to tweak the code to allow endless levels, or endless snakes, which is endlessly entertaining

QBASIC is free (and always was, used to come with Windows). Nowadays there are massive online resources available and freeware compilers available to turn your efforts into .exe files. When QBASIC was new, it was far, far too slow to do anything processor-heavy with. Nowadays, much faster PCs along with compiling to .exe to remove the need for an interpreter means they'll race along pretty nicely. If you're looking for a BASIC implementation as a beginner's language, I'd definitely recommend this one.

See above

In my opinion the premier language designed with an eye to the web. Although contrary to general opinion it is by no means exclusively intended to drive web applications. It has a tremendous amount of tools built in including extensive (and very useful) database connectivity and image management functions and can also be extended with additional modules.
Web developers as a whole who haven't been corrupted into the Microsoft VB end of things find themselves very firmly in the PHP or the Perl camp with very little patience for the other side.
Perl predates the web and hence is more of a bodge to use for web applications. It also has nowhere the inbuild funcionality of PHP, opting instead for an extensive module library which, while having many great modules is troubled by duplication and bugs.
The Perl base command structures are arguably more flexible (it took the addition of a single command for Perl to go object-oriented) despite the awkward need for manual data type specification (scalar, reference, array or hash). Also (as Perl fans always bring up) PHP has a great many distinct functions (particularly for string manipulation) that could be condensed into relatively few. For example there are many matching functions which vary in case-sensitivity and whether you are matching single characters or whole strings.
Having worked professionally in both languages I still find myself in the PHP camp despite seeing the advantage of Perl in many situations.