I may just be biased against PHP.

Facebook, at least, believe that it does have enough good parts to make it worth while, so my opinion is just that. My opinion.

I feel that JS has the following good points:

closures, anonymous functions & enough of the 'lisp-zen-nature' to be quite powerful. The prototypal inheritance is a bit weird, at first, and a little ugly on its own, but actually is quite powerful.

It's simple enough that any non-js programmer can pick it up pretty quickly.

PHP has all the usual well known issues, but has the following problems that JS doesn't:

a vast vast vast multi-level standard library, with many different ways of doing things (mysql, mysqli, pdo...) all of which are built in (or not, you can't tell until run-time). the various different php.ini settings which actually change how the language works (eg. 3 different 'escape to HTML' tags). although functions are 'considered bad practice' to use, there isn't a single source of truth on how to write it well. the documentation is a sea of misunderstanding and examples of how to abuse functions and do things which aren't non-obvious (the comments on each page). JS objects generally have methods attached for doing the various operations on them. php has a bit of that, but mostly external functions that you pass arrays or whatever to. That can be just a stylistic thing (being more 'c' like) but it also means you end up having to know - just to use the language at a basic level - that it's array_splice($a), sort($a), array_rand($a), strpos & string_replace, etc.

JS is really quite a small language. You can read crockford's, 'the good parts' in a day, including all the bits to avoid. PHP is a very big language. To write a 'the good parts' of it would require a much longer book, as you can't use the recommended parts without understanding pretty much of the whole language.

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