A bit off topic: I agree that a lot of newbies tend to gravitate towards PHP. When I was 14 I wanted to program, and PHP had such a low barrier to entry that

A bit off topic: I agree that a lot of newbies tend to gravitate towards PHP. When I was 14 I wanted to program, and PHP had such a low barrier to entry that I was able to get coding without any configuration. No working in the shell, just writing a file and uploading it to a shared host. To be honest, starting with PHP and just going was a really effective way to get me hooked to programming. Eight years later, and I've worked with C++, Ruby, Java, and C# to solve various problems. After seeing what else is out there, and understanding that different languages solve different problem sets, I don't think I'll ever gravitate back towards using PHP if I can help it. Occasionally it's fun to look at some of my old code and cringe. I'm sure if I could find some of my old questions on various forums they would look a lot like the question that user asked.