Is PHP useful for inexperienced web-people? Is it a good first web language? Is it a "better-PHP-than-nothing-at-all" kind of situation?

Have services like Heroku done enough to ease the learning curve for newbies interested in making webapps? Or is PHP still king?

I don't know, but I know that all of you have an opinion.

I think I'd rather have someone learn PHP than nothing, but it's a terrible, terrible language.

PHP is quite a bad language. I would hesitate to teach anyone PHP as a first language, if only because it's so poorly designed that I think it would turn people away from programming in general.

Omer mentioned on Twitter that Heroku doesn't actually help newbies enough with webapps; I agree that Heroku is still slightly out of reach for the most tech-unsavvy, but I think that maybe this is something we can and should change (it would feel almost embarrassing to me as a professional if someone were to Google "web app development" and find a bunch of PHP tutorials). What about a Coursera course on deploying Sinatra apps to Heroku (or a course on Sinatra in the first place)?

PHP has many problems, and I would like to see it die. (If Omer's link didn't convince you, I've attached another. I am not convinced that I would rather have someone learn PHP than learn nothing.)

Today, I would love it if people stopped using PHP to build new projects, and gradually phased it out as whatever existing systems that use it are replaced.

Regarding Heroku:

As many of you know, I love Heroku, and would encourage anyone to pick from Node, Rails, or Django (or another supported language!) and use Heroku for your My First Webapp.

I'm not sure what specific complaints you have about Heroku not helping newbies, because I think it's great. You can basically just git push and rake db:migrate your first Rails app and everything will Just Work out of the box.

I think the problem with Heroku is that you have to *get* to the point of being able to build a Rails app (and of course use Git for version control). All of these are (what we might consider little) hurdles that, for the average non-coder, seem like brick walls.

PHP has it's problems, yes. But it's not a bad starter language for someone wanting to get into programming via web development. You can do simple things at first procedure-ally and still move into proper object oriented development without starting over. It's tolerant of mistakes, and you learn quickly how to avoid them. And there is a plethora of examples and solutions available to help. It's not what I want to be programming in the rest of my life, but for simple quick projects it can be hard to beat.

PHP is a great language when you want to do rapid templates without having to do much work, also I use it a lot for simple APIs and middleware on my pet projects since I don't have to care about starting the server or executing the script, just drop it into the Apache folder and voilá.

I wouldn't suggest using PHP for large projects, for that I use Node.js and Ruby on Rails, but as I've said it's a great language for small projects, also a great language for beginners that want to learn web development.