I started using PHP when it was in version 3 and still use it occassionally. It has changed, but not considerably. The function naming is still a mess (backwards compatibility), arrays are completely inappropriate (naming them "bags" would be better), some decisions were so baffling (safe mode and magic quotes, superglobals, square brackets for arrays...) that I simply don't trust PHP to ever get better.

But there was a reason for experienced developers to use it - hosting. You could write a web app, ftp it somewhere and it would just work. There was no other platform aside from asp which would offer that. Nowadays this doesn't matter much, but 10 years ago it was great.

As a language though? Ugly. Just plain ugly.