Usually I would advise you to start with Python. It's beginner-friendly and has a lot of potential. But I think you should stick to PHP for now. You have alrea

Usually I would advise you to start with Python. It's beginner-friendly and has a lot of potential. But I think you should stick to PHP for now. You have already started to build up some knowledge. You should take advantage and build upon this foundation. Specially because as you start to get more comfortable with the basics, you'll focus more in other aspects of development than simply learning the language and its libraries. Having a couple friends nearby that can help is also a great boost. You'll probably want to move on in the future and learn other platforms. I see no hurry. Maybe you should take another 6 months and tackle a more challenging project, instead of rebooting to another language and platform right away. There's a lot of bad software written in PHP, but in other languages that happens too. On the other hand, great software and great companies such as Mediawiki (Wikipedia), Wordpress and Facebook have leveraged PHP to great success.