Give me a break. These are the orders in which I started learning my languages BASIC, C, assembly, (6502, z80, x86, MIPS 3000), Lisp, Perl, Java, Python, plenty of others then PHP. I really like Python, Ruby and Lua. I like the ecosystem for Python, yet want me to build a web application? I will pick PHP any day! It has it quirks and warts, but you can win big with it.