Is there a best human culture? Clearly some are further down the tech tree than others, but...is imperialism really inevitable?
PHP isn't a bad language if its tradeoffs work for you. But you would be hard pressed to see anything good today in BASIC from the 80s (like we might miss things if we all of a sudden were sent 1000 years back in time). There is no best PL, but there are new PL technologies that make programmer experiences better; using a language that doesn't include at least a few of those technologies is probably going to be a handicap (compared to your peers who are using them). Haskell is bit up the tech tree, but not incredibly so compared to other modern languages like Scala and even C#.
It's politically unacceptable to say so, but some human cultures are clearly worse than others, and yes, I expect there probably is a best culture. I wouldn't begin to guess at which one that is, but I would take people seriously if they're saying that a particular culture has got particular things right and other cultures can learn from that. The problem with imperialism was less the culture and more the exploitation and theft, which is not really relevant to the programming language case.
There is probably not a best culture (though there are definitely bad ones), just cultures that are further down the tech tree and therefore can out compete other ones. The same is true with programming languages.
PHP isn't a bad language if its tradeoffs work for you. But you would be hard pressed to see anything good today in BASIC from the 80s (like we might miss things if we all of a sudden were sent 1000 years back in time). There is no best PL, but there are new PL technologies that make programmer experiences better; using a language that doesn't include at least a few of those technologies is probably going to be a handicap (compared to your peers who are using them). Haskell is bit up the tech tree, but not incredibly so compared to other modern languages like Scala and even C#.