PHP in general is easy to write. Philosophically, it's all over the map due to mostly historical reasons. People say that the current development team are making it better and I don't disagree. There's just so much you cannot do when the core is so shakingly built.

Still, most of the uglies of the languages can be learned and then circumvented in action or by using proper tooling.

PHP 7 followed the general trend of bringing stronger types into dynamic languages. You can now annotate function arguments with types. I believe that makes it possible to write a static type checker, but I haven't seen one yet.

Why people hate it? I cannot speak for the whole public, but I dislike the language because it let me down. My first experience with PHP is from 1998ish, when I saw it as a way superior option to Perl, and ported a web application to PHP.

After that, I learned about programming. I didn't touch PHP again until 2013, when I got a job in a PHP shop. I went there with an open mind, thinking that the programming language is one of the least important things when building products. But every step of the way, PHP somehow got in my way. It hadn't gotten better in ways I would've liked. It let me down.

Now, of course, I don't work there anymore, so the amount of fucks I give at the language is slowly declining. Soon, I'll be able to not care at all.