Knowing how something works does not make it a good idea. I see this attitude a lot: if you've mastered something complicated, it seems so logical and inevitable. I had this attitude myself once when I only knew PHP. But then you discover that PHP is not god given or a natural phenomenon. A human put each and every behavior in a programming language. Some choices are better than others. Significantly worse choices were made in PHP than in e.g. Python. Therefore new programmers should learn a language like Python, not PHP. It's a waste of time to learn the intricacies of things that ended up that way due to a bad decision or even by accident. Note that Python is far from perfect too, but it's one of the least bad to start with.