I started using PHP for work back in the PHP 4 days when I started my career. As I grew in my abilities, appreciation for more advanced OOP concepts, and stricter typing, so did PHP, we kind of evolved together over the years. However, I'd be hard pressed to choose PHP for a green field project today.

I wonder if I'd have just started off immediately using something like Java if I would have been as effective? Early PHP's sloppiness (paired with early javascript) gave me a lot of flexibility and allowed me to learn things more deeply.