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#