I'm not sure I'll start a new project using PHP these days (though the latest Symfony is very good), however I still frequently uses it as a scripting language,

I'm not sure I'll start a new project using PHP these days (though the latest Symfony is very good), however I still frequently uses it as a scripting language, as an alternative to Bash. It's perfect for this, easy to use, and can scale to large scripts if needed.