I hate PHP, but I use it in my startup for three projects (sorry, for the fourth we are switching to Ruby but without rails, just mod_ruby), and actually without PHP my startup that is now working well and is profitable could not be here at all.

Reason? My co founder is a smart guy but was not exactly an hacker, it was a problem solver that used PHP and other tools to write web apps for a living. Now he is learning Ruby so we can switch language the next time, but without PHP the number of available co founder in your area and possibly your own friends (like my co founder is) may be near to zero.

I need to add one thing: we have a library called "utils.php" that tries to add something of useful to mitigate a bit the absurd library of PHP and add things like memoization, and I must admin that using a "functional" programming style where functions take PHP arrays and return PHP arrays, and clean design, it is possible to write decent code even in PHP.