Some people pour way too much emotions into the choice of programming languages. PHP is fine and no matter which language you start out with, switching to a new one later isn't a big deal - They are pretty much the same underneath the syntactic layer anyway.
Different languages have different libraries, different communities, different philosophies, different purposes. Sure, a person who started in C can go and write C-ish code in many other languages. But that's bad code. Good code is idiomatic and takes advantage of the strengths of the language and platform it's written for.
Depends on your perspective, I guess. The difference between not knowing how to program and learning, say, ruby is a fair bit larger than the difference between knowing how to program in php and learning ruby.
Take php and ruby (two languages I happen to have used a fair bit both). If you're writing your typical web app, you'd probably use mysql for a database. That's the same. You talk http to the client - same. You want to parse xml? Probably going to use libxml underneath the covers. And so on. So yes, there's different libraries for the two, but there's also a lot that is shared.
As for different philosophies, they are both pretty much imperative languages. Php has a simpler object model than ruby and ruby has some fp features, such as co-routines, but by and large you write programs in the same style.
And different purposes? I'll dispute that. You pretty much use both languages for more or less the same things.
Mind you - I'm not saying they are exactly the same. Clearly they're not. But I'm saying the difference is in the nuances.
And while I do agree that ruby is a nicer language than php, I think the trend of treating it as if it was toxic is completely out of proportions.
I agree that different languages don't all have perfectly different purposes or philosophies, but I'm not sure why you'd think I'm claiming that.
I think you could pick better examples. PHP and Ruby are both interpreted, Perl-inspired languages started by hobbyist first-time language designers who released 1.0 versions about months apart. So yes, if you apply them to similar problems and use similar techniques in the same languages, you'll have similar experiences.
But even so, I think PHP's purpose, which is rooted in letting amateurs simply render web pages, is very different than Ruby's purpose, which is a flexible, general purpose, objects-first scripting language. I also think their design philosophies are pretty different. PHP has never worried much about elegance or consistency; Ruby inherited Perl's DWIM approach, but tried to do it in a way that was not just functional, but beautiful.
You have me a bit confused. You say that I could have picked better examples, but then pretty much agree with me wholesale. So it seems I picked exactly the right example, at least if my intention was to support my own point.
That point being that languages such as Perl, Php, Ruby and even Python is relatively minor. I'll claim that any programmer who is competent with one of these will easily be able to transition to one of the others. There may be reasons why people don't always do this, but I don't think they are intellectual.
Yes, I agree that your intention is apparently to support your own point. In trying to win the argument game, you're missing out on the deeper point, and an opportunity for professional development.
I've learned quite a bit from working in different languages. You may not have, but that doesn't indicate there's nothing to learn.
PHP internals are actually very different from Javascript internals, but the same could be said for a lot of languages. Point stands though, no language is the same as another and habits die hard.
