The Corolla was simple but very well designed; it's manuals were used in classes teaching car mechanics. PHP was not well designed. No one learning to program

The Corolla was simple but very well designed; it's manuals were used in classes teaching car mechanics. PHP was not well designed. No one learning to program should choose it as a first language. That fact that people did choose it was because it was free, easier than Perl and cheap/easy to deploy (in the shared hosting era). You are better off starting with a typed language like C#/Java/Kotlin (for OO-first) or OCaml/F# (for FP-first) or even Golang. PHP sets you back if chosen as a first language.