Also, despite all the naysayers PHP's going through a bit of a revival at the moment. It's certainly not dying.

It's recently got Composer as an awesome package manager, the Laravel 4 framework, new features like short array syntax, closures etc and support from more PaaS (e.g. Google App engine). The community is really getting behind all this as well, which will help bring up the reputation.

I'd still recommend anyone to learn PHP as their first programming language. It's still the easiest to hack your first idea together, there's more jobs than any other language and the standard of code is improving now the language has the features and infrastructure it needs.