[hinicholas]

Honestly, I don't think any language is detrimental to a persons development as a programmer. Even straight Python and C have their quirks. Heck I'd argue that PHP is a great base to start learning web development. Ruby, Python, and .NET all have great frameworks that give you MVC, an ORM, and even templating for free now days, but I feel like understanding the benefit and appreciating those sorts of things comes with the experience of writing an application at a level a bit lower than a full framework.