[twymer]

If the ideas you hope to prototype live on the web, this is a reasonable choice. However, I don't recommend using PHP as a general programming language.

Python kind of works for everything, if you want to do web dev you can pick up Django, plenty of GUI libraries and it works on all platforms easily.

[dkersten]

This is pretty much what I would have said if I'd checked the comments sooner. PHP works well enough for a web language, but if you want to do anything else, its not so great. Python works, IMHO, equally well for web, desktop GUI, shell scripts etc.

[rachnaspace]

thanks!