[paulbaumgart]

I learned programming with HTML/PHP. It's great in that HTML is really easy to understand and lets you draw colorful text and pictures to the screen almost immediately. Then, you can jump to Turing-completeness with a new kind of tag, "<?PHP" that can handle form inputs and generate new HTML!

And then get them over to Python or something ASAP. PHP doesn't have enough structure for a beginner to learn good software design principles, it's best kept to just teaching a thing or two about loops and control structures.

Teaching HTML + JS is tempting, but then you kinda have to explain the whole DOM too, which just makes things complicated.