What do you think is the most practical web development language to
learn these days is?
I think PHP is the most practical language.
I would vote Ruby perhaps.
Practical for doing what?
If I had to go back and redo things I would have started with Python (Django) (It’s easier to learn IMO) or Ruby on Rails, mostly because of my opinion on PHP’s maintainability is a lot of work. But PHP is good to learn it just requires you to know a lot of functions.
I think asp.net with c# or vb is very common for web development nowadays.