You are not wasting your time with learning PHP, but it also is not a good foundation - the language is a collection of tools that someone somewhere found usefu

You are not wasting your time with learning PHP, but it also is not a good foundation - the language is a collection of tools that someone somewhere found useful. Employment wise it is a safe bet - there is a lot of legacy code for a person to maintain for a few lifetimes and then more. The hatred towards PHP is explainable - if you use Haskell or Clojure today it is because you chose it. If you use php it is because you were forced to use it. So every little and not so little gotcha in the language (and there are a lot of them) is causing a lot of pain. I have used python/(tornado/gevent)/flask/ stack with success. Disclaimer - PHP programming 4 years, python 1