I'd have to disagree here. I don't think its entirely unimportant which language a programmer begins with. Every language has its own community, resources, paradigms, general practices, etc. and if you start with a "rather lawless" language like PHP, you could be in for useless headaches. I started with C and initially it was difficult to grasp the OOP paradigm. I actually think starting with a functional language would be quite interesting since one is immediately confonted with the bridge between mathematical theory applied.
I'm so sorry- that was supposed to be "first functional programming language". (I'm already doing some programming in Python)