I quite like PHP, one of the first languages I learnt, it has it's quirks
and can be written terribly if a programmer doesn't keep on top of his
game. I like to think of PHP as a building block, because of it's low
barrier for entry it's one of the first programming languages a lot of
people learn, and it isn't too bad (I've seen worse) - of course once you
grasp the basic and object oriented concepts from PHP it mainly echo's
across languages, it makes moving onto something like Python or Perl a lot
easier and even into C++/C#
A lot of people just stick at the low barrier and write crappy code, but
some go on and become brilliant programmers who maybe wouldn't have had the
chance without PHP.