PHP is OK for small, short-lived web applications (which is, sometimes, exactly what you need). It's only when the small things outlive their original purpose age get large and complicated that maintenance becomes a nearly impossible job of fixing one thing without two others and when you really start regretting the choice of PHP.

Not that there is no nice, maintainable PHP code out there. It's just that the overwhelming majority of the PHP code I've seen is a broken mess.

Because PHP and the whole LAMP stack is like air. Everyone knows it because all you have to do to use it is just breathe. Anyone can just pick it up and immediately make an awesome website. It's a simple easy-to-learn language with dozens of easy all-in-one installers. No command line haxoring needed. Unlike ASP.NET, the tools are free. Unlike Rails or Django, hosting is cheap and easy to find.

With all the hate on PHP, I feel like it's the childhood friend from elementary and middle school that you out-grew because you became "too cool" for them in high school.

The majority of Interstate (YCS11) is PHP and our codebase is well structured and the code is pretty.

PHP is a fine language if you write code properly.