I think PHP is a great language, not just a good one, and its competitors like Python and Ruby offer little to nothing over PHP (and vice-versa). They're all in the same boat. Same programming style (OOP), same constructs, same runtime models (interpreted, JIT). I'm so fucking tired of people who have not programmed in PHP claiming anything, let alone that it's a bad language. I can make that claim about any language currently in existence with plenty of "evidence" to back it up, but my purpose here isn't to annoy. The only thing I can deduce from posts like this is that people lash out against PHP because they get off on being closed-minded and trolling others.

To me, it's a so-so language, with some bad parts, some ok. On the plus side, it's easy to pick up, and it gets the job done for many projects. Perhaps it's a bit like the Ikea of programming languages, if you will--no the best of furniture for sure, but when you need a table and some chairs with little efforts, it's nice to have, and they're not horrendous unless you couldn't build them correctly.