I mean if you tinker around with programming languages a lot, odds are pretty good that you have also spent a few dozen hours on Python, and another few dozen on Ruby, and it's probably pretty hard to avoid spending dozens of hours mucking about with JS even if you don't like learning new languages just by virtue of it being necessary for writing web stuff or scraping stuff off existing webpages.
So yeah. Don't make PHP your first language. Probably not your second either. But if you've played with Python, and learned to write the simplest and clearest thing that can possibly work, if you've worked in C, and decided that's as close to the bare metal as you ever want to get, if you've learned enough Java to know when to use the SeriousBusinessFactoryProxyInterface, if Haskell has made you realize that programming is really just math... then sure, learn you some PHP, write a toy web project and discover that the simple things really can be simple.
I still don't know of any stacks where it's easier to write a simple, low maintenance side project that will stay up for years without issue, where multiple projects can share a $5 / month VPS, than the LAMP stack.
So yeah. Don't make PHP your first language. Probably not your second either. But if you've played with Python, and learned to write the simplest and clearest thing that can possibly work, if you've worked in C, and decided that's as close to the bare metal as you ever want to get, if you've learned enough Java to know when to use the SeriousBusinessFactoryProxyInterface, if Haskell has made you realize that programming is really just math... then sure, learn you some PHP, write a toy web project and discover that the simple things really can be simple.
I still don't know of any stacks where it's easier to write a simple, low maintenance side project that will stay up for years without issue, where multiple projects can share a $5 / month VPS, than the LAMP stack.