Ultimately what qualities do you like in languages? PHP is easy, has cheap ubiquitous hosting,, dynamically typed, and focuses on being productive and getting something out door fast.

I like think about correctness, safety, static type systems, and generally trying to catch things at compile time.

As a result I like Haskell, rust, ml, elm etc I'm not a much of fan of PHP, but I can see why people use it.