PHP was my gateway to _everything_, most importantly employment.
I don't use it any more, but in 2002 when shared hosting and deploying by uploading files via FTP was the thing it was a lot easier to get started with than Perl or Java (which I desperately tried to get into back then).
Oh yeah. PHP was the first language where I thought "hey, this thing that already works, I could rewrite it in exactly the same form in another language". I rewrote a Perl payment gateway thing that I had written almost alone earlier into PHP, made it OO and everything. No point whatsoever but what an exercise :P This was ~1997.
So it was almost the first language I used to make actual money.
I started with BASIC, then shell scripting, then an internally developed language similar to COBOL. Being self taught I didn't really "get" data types, so the big names at the time like C and Java made no sense. PHP was a crutch that allowed me to learn and experiment with functions that were pretty forgiving. The eventual type related bugs I'd introduce into my code where it would work but not correctly eventually helped the concept click in my brain. I still don't get Java.
