But the thing is for many people (at least for me) was the instant gratification PHP provides can be a powerful hook. With PHP you can create interesting visual

But the thing is for many people (at least for me) was the instant gratification PHP provides can be a powerful hook. With PHP you can create interesting visual things with virtually no experience, no boilerplate required. It's one of the few languages where that is (was, more options today than when I learned) really possible. PHP wasn't the first language I learned, but it absolutely was the language that got me hooked on programming by giving me the power to create things, visual things, interactive things, and more importantly, let me do so without following a step by step tutorial (I had basic html knowledge prior). > And what makes them bad is they permit, induce or even explicitly teach bad habits. Very true, I had some bad habits from php that took me a while to kick, but for me it was a small price to pay. > The reality is almost any language allows you to create a single file and run it and see a web page these days. That's not something unique to PHP at all. These days that may be the case, but many commenters here are referencing when they were learning to program, and a decade ago it was something incredibly unique to PHP.