What is cool about PHP programming?

Stateless, request-lifetime model works well for web, big library of packages, huge hosting market, simple to pick up. At the end of the day it's a language and like English it has it's faults (i before e, array before key) but you know you can go to any server and speak it and get something done.

You can read and write .xls files with it.

It supports procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming. You could even mix-and-match styles if needed.

Sure, it might not do them all 100% perfectly, but it does them well enough to get things done.