YES, you are wasting your time with PHP! (If by "wasting time" you mean that there are other better ways to use your time and learn
much more in
the same amount of time.)
PHP is mostly ok as tool to get shit done with but it is one of the worst possible options for something to learn as a first programming language for many reasons, including:
- you will not learn how most real programming languages are, as PHP was not designed or engineered as a programming language, instead it is a collection of tools and commands that mutated and evolved into a programming language
- most code you will encounter written in PHP is very bad code (not all, but most), so you will find it very hard to learn from other people's code (this is the main reason to stay away from PHP imho!)
- it either lacks or has weird variants of the constructs that permit certain very useful styles of programming: no real closures until 5.3 and the need for the `use (...)` syntax to have them behave like in other languages, it has two namespaces for functions and variables (not other common language has this - yeah, there's Perl and Common Lisp, but...), weird stuff when it comes to namespaces, weird rules and stuff like autoloading, more weird stuff around the OOP features...
- so it leads to you learning all sorts of details that are basically untransferable skills - i.e. they won't make you a better programmer in general they will just make you a more effective PHP coder
I seriously recommend you to learn Javascript as a first language, as it has all the important constructs needed to learn programming in a sane way and it will also help you on the front-end side. It's just as simple as PHP to learn (I'd say simpler, because it doesn't have all the weird stuff in PHP) and later it will allow you to learn the basic concepts of both OOP and functional programming without much pain. Whereas coming from PHP, lots of concepts will be difficult to learn because "your mind will be twisted the wrong way". Javascript just feels natural for a beginner with no preconceptions: you can just assign a function to a variable and pass it around as a variable to other functions, then slowly learn what objects are by using them as "arrays" at first, then as arrays that have a special "prototype" (and with this, boom, you will have learned the simplest way to implement what in OOP is fancily called "inheritance" and you are in OOP land now).
Python is cool too, and it might be easier to find webhosts with python support than with Node (this is for Javascript running on the server, like PHP). Ruby too, but it too has "weird stuff" in it so I wouldn't recommend it as a first language, but it's still a better option than PHP. You can easily learn PHP in the future if your job will require, but don't start with it.