Visual Basic for the Web

According to Tim Bray, Andi Gutmans said at the recent Zend/PHP Conference that "the right way to think about PHP is as Visual Basic for the Web."

My new job is at an avowed "PHP shop", even though the position was advertised on a Perl-oriented job board. A lot of the technical portion of my interview was spent pointing out that I had skills in both -- one of my future co-workers even admitted to me that he was biased towards me as a "Perl guy" instead of just as a programmer.