I'll gladly praise it. It's a very practical language with good tooling and excellent amounts of libraries and scripts available. Performance is decent, development speed for tools, toys and prototypes is extreme.

The standard library has a lot of good stuff for calling API:s, handling JSON, shelling out, string juggling and HTML publishing on a socket. In every typical install you also have common database interfaces. I've done so much problem solving at breathtaking speed in single file PHP scripts and PsySH over the years.

The threading story isn't or wasn't very good so typically I've done logic in PHP and then driven it from something like a Scheme, Picolisp or Elixir when I've needed it.