As opposed to its peers (eg. Ruby, Python), the original PHP was not a programming language but just a collection of tools for HTML preprocessing. Although the

As opposed to its peers (eg. Ruby, Python), the original PHP was not a programming language but just a collection of tools for HTML preprocessing. Although the current PHP has nothing to do with the original one, and PHP 5.3 actually has pretty nice feature set with namespaces (finally!) and anonymous functions, its "non-academic" roots still show off as general ugliness. That's why I wouldn't recommend PHP to anyone as their first programming language (been there, done that, nowadays a Pythonista).