PHP was my gateway to _everything_, most importantly employment.
I don't use it any more, but in 2002 when shared hosting and deploying by uploading files via FTP was the thing it was a lot easier to get started with than Perl or Java (which I desperately tried to get into back then).
Oh yeah. PHP was the first language where I thought "hey, this thing that already works, I could rewrite it in exactly the same form in another language". I rewrote a Perl payment gateway thing that I had written almost alone earlier into PHP, made it OO and everything. No point whatsoever but what an exercise :P This was ~1997.
So it was almost the first language I used to make actual money.
I don't use it any more, but in 2002 when shared hosting and deploying by uploading files via FTP was the thing it was a lot easier to get started with than Perl or Java (which I desperately tried to get into back then).