According to this post (by Cal Evans) on the Ibuildings blog (and this report from the EDC), PHP has come out as one of the top scripting languages on the web today.

In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey. [...] Given the wide variety of topics, there is no way PHP will ever score first place across the board, however, that is not a bad thing.

Categories the languages were rated on included ease of use, extensibility, community, availability of tools and memory management. PHP got high marks on most with a few (like client-side scripting) lagging behind. Cal sees it from two angles, though - one to celebrate how far PHP has come and the other to look forward to see what things the language needs to improve on.