PHP stands for Personal home page: Hypertext Preprocessor.. its a strange acronym like GNU (GNUs Not Unix)

YABB was made in Perl, a C++ based scripting language mainly used in linux, C++ is the main programming language on nearly all platforms, its a medium language, hard(ish) to get into

PHP is a high level scripting language, my personal favourite now as well since i started in it a few weeks ago, its quite easy to pickup, you need a webhost which supports PHP, to test and learn ive installed apache, php and mysql on my pc so its faster and easier