Defend PHP; convince me it isn't horrible

I wouldn't call it horrible... I'd say it has a lot of warts.

There are some very solid bits of code out there in PHP - Wordpress and Drupal being the foremost ones I've used.

You can generally survive with the base library, which tends to have nearly everything you'd want in it - compare to Perl or others which you'll be running to modules the first time you need to process XML, do graphics manipulation, or connect to a database, and often have to bug your sysadmin to do this...

PHP is a station wagon - not sexy, but gets the job done.

1. That's a 1 year old post

2. English language is horrible as well (theoretically)

3. I'd try to convince anyone, but it would waste highly valuable time making nice income developing in PHP :)

Great programmers will write pretty code in any languages.

However, I think that poor programmers will write more ugly code in PHP than in python/django for instance.

So, if you compare the overall quality, PHP loses.

Also, it seems that these days, great programmers use clojure/python/ruby/arc instead of PHP.. so that doesn't help PHP quality ratio (As poor programmer using PHP will continue to use PHP since they would never ever be willing to learn a new language).

I've recently worked with the most ugly code of my life. 1000 lines function, bad indentation, 8 levels of if/foreach, wrong OO, lots of repitition, etc. Guess what, it was written in PHP. Does it prove something? No. Does it make me like PHP? Really not.

That being said, I've seen some pretty clean PHP code and I even had some fun with it.

I like the comment: "poor programmers get very defensive about their language"

I like php. I like functions too (as opposed to objects). I'm probably just old school. I also like my car, which doesn't have a motor to move the windows up and down, and doesn't have a remote to lock the doors, but it works great.

If you can be convinced that PHP is horrible then you're probably better off using Ruby on Rails.