I've personally used PHP on and off for over 5 years. If I had the choice, I currently wouldn't use anything else for backend web programming; to me, the amount of functions and APIs it has for website specific tasks (as well as other stuff) makes it extremely easy. This is not to say that I am not open to other languages for website backends, but it's currently the best one I've found and my favorite, as you can no doubt tell by this post.
As for computer programming, I haven't done a huge amount of it, although I am learning just by messing around with scripts and making my own random, albeit fairly useless, programs. I started by learning C mainly because PHP is based heavily on C so I found the syntax natural, but afterwards got into C++ when my co-worker lent a book about it to me. C++ seems like it would be my goto language if I were to create a program, but to be honest I haven't taken the time to really examine other popular languages such as Java.