It's in vogue to hate on PHP especially here on HN. Language hate based on some sort of popularity contest is silly and language snobbery wont be tolerated at any company worth its salt (read: NOT most startups)
If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) language, the fact that some big sites were made to work with PHP also sort of misses the point. When most of the big "success stories" adopted PHP, options for web-friendly open source languages were much thinner. Now if you look at the new development projects they highlight, you don't see PHP come up that much. Facebook, for example, is prominently using Haskell. I don't know anyone who both programs in Haskell and is willing to touch PHP.
Of course, many thoughtful criticisms of PHP have been discussed on HN. e.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ & http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-f....
Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated.
I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based side projects.
Is public perception the reason you are happy to be mostly using something else now, though?
I really enjoy some of the more flexible syntax and design choices present in some other languages. It also help that various job requirements over the year have required that I build a broader skillset. Finally, the growth I've experienced by stepping outside my comfort zone the past few years is probably the best benefit, which is a good experience regardless of which language(s) you start with.
In the end, however, as we both know, most decisions in software development are an exercise in managing tradeoffs. I guess the core of my argument is that, in the past few years, PHP has done a great job at improving its balance of tradeoffs.
I was curious and wanted to see if that is the case. So I checked for the most basic thing. The arrow notation for lambdas. Surely they must've added that by now. Surely they must've added that before Java did. Nope, still RFC. Now I wonder if it's idiomatic to pass those "long form" lambdas around when writing in functional style or is it something nobody does. In any event this little discovery makes me think parent's sentiment seems to be still justified.
Seriously, the biggest problem with php is that fundamentally it's a templating language. One thing I've seen with templating libraries in general, is that they are meant to take a template and a data structure and display output based on these 2, but what ends up happening is they end up converging on turing completeness. It starts with the need for some kind of looping structure in the template. And then someone needs some random logic that is easier to do in the template than before the model, and so another feature gets added to the templating engine. And so it goes, things get kind of bolted on, without a grand vision, and you end up with an API that is inconsistent, where the order of inputs is never the same (is the first parameter haystack or needle??).
Also, the basic shape of the code that tends to get written in PHP is heavily influenced by it's being a templating language. PHP applications tend to end up having a lot of code in the template, that should be done before rendering the model. Rather than a sane 2 pass system, where all the data is gathered and the logic handled to produce a simple data structure that is passed to a very simple template, you end up with crazy monstrosities where there's opening and closing <?php> tags everywhere. And you render part of the page, then grab some more data, then render some more page, then maybe do a curl to a 3rd party vendor, then render some more of the page, and it's actually very hard to keep switching mental state to match the context of the code you're looking at.
Anyhoooo, you're getting downvoted because there's lots of literature on why PHP is a terrible language. I'm only replying because it's sort of cathartic, since I maintain a wordpress codebase, and any time I have to interact with core, instead of being able to sanely intercept the underlying data, modify it then pass it along in one place, I have to constantly add lots of random hooks in lots of random places to catch the data just before it's being rendered. It's a total mess, and far more complicated than it needs to be (though there is some debate whether this style made it more approachable from a novice plugin development perspective).
By that time I was doing most of my coding in Ruby and Python, but this businesslike approach to PHP made me realize this is a place where people really get their hands dirty and build things, rather than care about fads.
Things have really changed, the tone & level of discussion here are now very different. Seems like PHP is kind of a canary in the coal mine in that regard.
Personally, having had to write a couple of Mediawiki plugins and an extension for a rubbish CMS called TYPO3, my experience so far is that the PHP hate is very much justified.
It's more like those vast parts of the internet are working despite PHP. Why do you think Windows is powering vast numbers of desktops? It's not for its technical excellency. ;)