It's bad for language purists, but it's very, very good for getting stuff done fast, easy and good-enough.
See Facebook etc.
A lot of programmers don't believe that a shoddy language (in terms of language design) can be effective, but it is.
I also happen to think that PHP scales really, really well the range that most sites need (say, from 1 to 50 servers). In that range, PHP is almost never the bottleneck.
