Many perl mongers, myself among them, would disagree. But maybe the brain damage has set in and I can't judge properly. But, really, you're showing serious ignorance placing Perl in the same sentence as PHP and BASIC. Perl is on the power continuum somewhere just shy of Lisp, and along-side Ruby (possibly even above it; Perl 6 will place it squarely above any other mainstream language on that continuum). Not liking the syntax is no excuse for misleading newbies into thinking Perl is in the same class as PHP.
Anyway, many a developer learned programming with Perl. Some even turned out good.
The real double edged sword for PHP is that it made it very easy to do web programming. The good side of that is that it let a lot of people write web stuff who otherwise might not have been able to. The bad side of that is that a lot of those people write really bad code that is no fun to clean up.
I hear this "easy" term applied to PHP by many people, but when I look at the language itself, I don't see it. PHP is easy for me because I did C for 12 years, but I look at the comp.lang.php newsgroup and see newbies tripping over all sorts of things.
There's a tradition of building simple CRUD apps in PHP - a handful of database tables, and a PHP file for each URL that acts as a thin glue layer between raw SQL and HTML presentation. These are some of the easiest Web apps to understand - which is not to say that they are actually easy - and they are a good place to start.
By contrast, learning something like Rails requires a big up-front investment. There are objects. There's a database and an ORM. There's an MVC framework. There's an abstract mapping between URLs and the methods of your controller objects. All of this makes great sense once you can see the big picture, but to a brand-new programmer PHP must look a lot less intimidating.
Down that path lies madness. I've seen the newbie-focused tutorials for PHP, and it explains a lot of the garbage that passes for software in the PHP world. It is entirely possible to write good software in PHP (I'm reasonably impressed by the Dokuwiki and Flyspray code, for example), but you have to learn the language at least twice to get to that point. You learn it as a newbie, and learn horrible practices from the vast collection of misguided "help" in the Internet. You produce lots of code with those horrible practices...like no DB abstraction, inappropriate or no use of objects and encapsulation, and "gradually mix PHP into your HTML" design. And then you realize you've built an unmaintainable mess and start rewriting it with all of the better practices that have since been bolted on to PHP.
Of course, despite all of that I still recommend PHP for a large classes of application because it is pervasive, hard to make pathologically slow (whereas Ruby and Python can be made pathologically slow even by really good developers--see Plone for an example), and has a pretty large selection of libraries (some are so bad as to be counter-productive, but many are good). But as a newbie language it's rather toxic.
With PHP, it was and is very easy to get started. I wrote about it here some:
But, yeah, PHP is a scary language. In addition to what you've already mentioned, PHP's core "array" datatype appears to have been designed by a committee of drunken camels.
(OK, I know of one stealth mode startup that's going to make it even easier, but that's beside the point.)
SICP uses Scheme (a Lisp dialect) and falls under the "deeply understand but not practical at the start" category.
Just fine: Ruby. good, but less simple and elegant than Python.
Good if you want to deeply understand the principles of being a programmer but don't care about being very practical at the start: Lisp (yes, Lisp can be practical, but it's trouble for a newbie)
Avoid: Perl, PHP, BASIC variants. These cause brain damage.