> That, and if you are just starting to get into web development
These two things don't square well, and is a major reason why I discourage PHP. It's pedagogically suboptimal to be encouraging the sorts of behavior that culturally accepted PHP often does.
You can write good PHP. After many years I got to the point where I could say confidently that I can. But it took me most of a decade to get to that point of confidence.
That being said, it's a small sample size of maybe just over 100 over the last few years. Weigh accordingly.
You and yours really need to read up on what you hate so much so you don't look like a bunch of fools arguing about things that don't exist.
That said: There are many projects still using crap like that, but that is because of bad programmers. This stuff is deprecated in core and its use is heavily discouraged.
Anytime someone new to PHP or not at a higher level asks a question, I point them to proper resources.
I'm in ##php and #phpmentoring on Freenode helping out with questions.
I write articles that are, in my humble opinion, not bad and have received many compliments from people who learned from my writings.
I'm doing my part, and so are many other PHP-centric developers, and it's annoying as hell to have us lumped in with code that's several years old, or sweatshop programmers that know nothing more than the very basics.
The code I'd write in say, Clojure day one would be terrible when compared to the code I'd write a year or two later. Does that mean I shouldn't learn and use it?