@Niki: Understood - I thought you meant language of all languages in the sense of lowest level... I said assembler because it is the lowest you can get without hitting actual machine code. Granted there are many different Assembly languages for all the different architectures and then there is also 'high level' assembler...
In the mainstream languages, yes, C syntax is the most widespread. I would revise your above statement to say this: "C is the language of all imperative languages." because it technically is, as far as I know the vast majority of imperative languages base their syntax off of C.
I will also concede the fact that many functional languages use C to implement their VM or interpreter. Which would mean that knowing C would give you the ability to understand the language's implementation (this is true of Python's C implementation).
Ruby vs. Python
As you've said, the distinction is one of opinion and taste than it is objective. I prefer Python for it's minimal way of doing things - IOW, there usually is 'one way of doing' something. I prefer it because there is less reinventing of the wheel and a focus on engineering the language for the 'Pythonic way'. For me, decidability is key, it also makes the language and resultant code very coherent and easy to understand across developers.
One of PHP's major downfalls is it's flexibility - it's so flexible that it has little structure. I haven't actually used Ruby, period, so I have no grounds for criticizing it - I am only doing so based on your statements with an analogy using PHP (which I am experienced with).
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