On the flip side, it really makes little sense to learn a language that is useless for what you want to do. If what you really want to do is program a microcontroller, it is my opinion that PHP or Python would be a very poor choice in first languages.
Having never done embedded work, I don't have an opinion either way. There are people successfully doing embedded work with Python, though (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/240996/anyone-using-pytho...), though I would probably choose Lua over Python in most cases.
If I were teaching somebody who wanted to do embedded work (and Python/Lua/<insert "easier" language here> really wasn't a deployment option, which is very feasible), I would start them with Python to get them to the point of understanding how programming works, then switch them to a more appropriate language for the project. Teaching the algorithms in Python, then converting them to C is a great way to learn the difference between the languages and to introduce the resource management that occurs.
That is also why I prefer Python - I'm not a computer scientist, I am a business owner who uses programming as a tool to achieve my goals. Sometimes it's 2 weeks or more between writing code and Python is by far the best language that fits into my workflow.
