People who hate PHP-- or even worse, hate other people for writing PHP-- generally don't have anything of value to add to the criticisms of PHP. They just dismiss the language entirely, link to 2012-era blog posts about its imperfections, and never bother to see if anything was fixed in PHP 7 (or, as of the end of this year, PHP 8).

This kind of toxic mentality doesn't produce better code, and it sure doesn't produce better coders. It's just free-floating hostility and gatekeeping.

Here's a few parts of PHP that improved in the past 6 years:

* Static type declarations (and return types, and strict typing, ...)

* Composer has become the de facto package manager for the PHP ecosystem

* Better cryptography (bye mcrypt, hello sodium)

* High quality open source libraries (i.e. Guzzle)

And I haven't even reviewed all of the changes coming in 8.0.