I suspect if there were as many Ruby devs as there are PHP devs you'd have just as many articles decrying Ruby, when they really ought to be decrying bad developers regardless of language.
I've responded to people who didn't realize PHP has had first-class objects for years, has a very good community-driven package manager, is easy to unit test, scales very easily and very well, and has nifty features like closures and traits.
In short, it's mostly people who have no idea what they're talking about complaining about a language they've either never used or used years ago when it was completely different.
That said, there are a few people around here who have proper criticisms about PHP that doesn't center around "the order of parameters is too hard to remember!". YMMV.
It would seem you're definitely conscious of the disdain toward PHP. I would certainly keep that in mind if you find yourself applying for a job. If you're going to apply to a trendy (uppity) start up in California, the kids there will probably laugh at you if you have PHP listed before Node.js.
Study PHP, but on a framework with some sort of built in architecture. It's possible to write entire apps with all of your logic spread out willy-nilly throughout the view.
Yeah, this is the kind of shop you really don't want to work for.
edit: also,
> Study PHP, but on a framework with some sort of built in architecture. It's possible to write entire apps with all of your logic spread out willy-nilly throughout the view.
This is terrible advice and you should stop giving it.
Here are some of the larger websites and what they use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_m...
As for studying it, I wouldn't make it the sole language in your toolkit but if you enjoy it study it.
If you have the time, test RoR vs Laravel, that's a very good study :)