I'm not the one you asked, but what I like isn't really about PHP itself, but the fact that I can get dirt cheap hosting with PHP and MySQL. Every time I want to create a small "app" that makes some manual task easier it's very useful to create something I can access from the internet.

Python is really useful for stuff like that too, but (in my experience) not as easy and cheap to use as an web app.

For example I go to dinner with some friends every month and we always forget who's turn it is to choose and book a restaurant. So I just made this PHP page that shows the current and next 2 months with a name. So we always use that to see who's turn it is.

... And it's one of the languages everybody craps on. Like, I've seen people compare JavaScript favourably to it.

Quite early on the eyes, powerful, fast to build and rolk out projects, about. A billion libraries with all the functions you'll ever need. People both about it because it has some language quirks from way back in the beginning, I see it as stability. I don't know how node is now but I remember a few years back where every bug fix came accompanied not only by 10 new bugs but also a bunch of interface changes that immediately broke everything. Every. Single. Damn. Time.

Having said that, it under very active development and has been majorly improved over the years. Dumb design choices are no long available and right now it's quite easy to work securely with it.

Beyond the "but these two functions should have similar naming but they don't!" argument, that with a good editor doesn't matter anyway, there isn't really a good argument out there not to use it.