Yea... I don't work with PHP.

I don't think its popularity with beginners is what earned it a 'terrible reputation' though.

There are quite a few other good reasons to not like it.

I have a hard time thinking of PHP as "old". :) C is old. FORTRAN is old. And I'd argue that PHP's terrible reputation isn't because it's old, but rather because it's primitive. It has all sorts of nasty coupling between layers, and encourages bad programming habits. On the other hand, something like 75% of the world's websites run on it, so it can't be that hard to find PHP programmers.