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Quite possibly never, but it was arguably the best web language in the early 2000s.

Perl fans would probably object strongly to that, but it is true that when PHP first caught on there really weren't any great choices.

The strong selling point of PHP for a long time was cheap hosting. Combine that with a fast learning curve and you're set.

Nowadays, it's not so clear cut price wise, but PHP took a strong advance in term of user base - look at the number of libraries, projects, and jobs (!) available in PHP, vs python or ruby.

good selling points, but those things never made it a good language, it was just convenient.

PHP followed a very uncommon path. Features were added as needed, in an incremental fashion. Nice syntax is never a huge problem, though that's probably most people complaint. That said, it isn't worse than its "contenders" in terms of feature set. You get a decent object system, lambdas (note that they'd been there for a long time, but it's more convenient now), a wide range of bindings. It's not pretty, but it does the job in many cases.

But, anyway, if you're really looking for a good language (something efficient, where you don't have to spend hours to spot a stupid bug), skip the dynamic ones altogether, and go for as much static analysis you can get.

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