PHP sucks? Go and tell to Facebook, wordpress, drupal, magento, etc...
They actually make money using PHP. The language sucks? Well, it actually works fine for what it's intended too. :)
That doesn't mean the tools are good.
Let's look beyond the programming language and ask "Is the thing we're working on useful? Truly useful to people?"
Because if it's not, then it doesn't matter if it's written in PHP or Assembly or VB6.
for better or worse, php is everywhere and easy to learn, and that's why sites run it.
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-...
There is still a problem with the language, in that once you get to its limits ( which you reach quickly ) then you are stuck between re-architecting your system or basically ripping out the internals of the language and replacing them with your own bits.
tl;dr Friends don't let friends write projects in PHP
I personally think PHP is indeed a mess as a tool, it is sort of a bunch of unorganized stuff that works. I've used it myself though, but found out other stuff like rails for example are simpler and more powerful.
so when it comes to productivity and related stuff, you might question yourself about what tools to choose, which are better and which ones suck.