P.H.P
Honestly, PHP is a fine language to begin learning, it's very easy to get a local development server going for someone who barely knows the CLI, it's integrated tightly with HTML (for better or worse) which make things simple before you move to patterns like MVC, etc.
You can build some pretty cool, performant, beautiful software with PHP - and there are always well paying jobs out there (especially if you're not in the valley where Ruby & Python are disproportionately more popular than elsewhere.)
PHP 7 with a new, (loose) type system and a lot of the old, insecure cruft removed isn't actually a bad language, especially if your build process involves Composer and you're following the standards laid out by the PHP FIG/PSR.
> How would you feel if your darling language received this kind of review?
I'm not that attached to my favourite languages, but the thing is - they just don't receive it for some reason : ) It's probably correlated with why they're my favourites. I don't have overly fancy preferences, I like C# (it is getting its share of hate, but hardly ever as a language in and of itself, it's typically directed at Microsoft and that's another story) and Kotlin (sort of like Swift but for Android).
And it is really good at providing server-side programming to a web site with the utter minimum of work --- after all, that's why it's used so much! No compilation, no deployment, not even any need to have two files open at once; just stick a couple of lines of PHP into an HTML file, hit reload, and you're there.
I wouldn't call it a particularly interesting language, but if the OP reckons they'd be motivated by building web apps, it's a perfectly reasonable choice.
>No compilation, no deployment, not even any need to have two files open at once; just stick a couple of lines of PHP into an HTML file, hit reload, and you're there.
>And it is really good at providing server-side programming to a web site with the utter minimum of work
This is exactly the problem with the language. It lets you cuts corners when those corners are there for a reason. For example, look at the ease of deployment that you have mentioned. For a novice, this will be appealing. But for someone with experience with web applications, it might look appalling that you can map urls directly to execute arbitrary files in a directory.
This theme is found throughout the language. In an attempt to make work easier for novices and to make it easy to work with data send from html forms, the language has been packed with so much weird behaviors that you need to learn before you can build stuff in php with any sort of confidence.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg....
This ease of use and low entry threshold is a double-edged sword though