I helped develop a PHP application used by about 30,000,000 people. It consisted of well-organized objects that followed proper design patterns. Our API was easy to use and understand.

Although PHP was an effective, decent language, it wasn't the best tool for our project. It lacked certain functional features, brevity and syntactic sugar that one might find in Python.

The Web is full of emotional, profanity-laden debates pitting one language against another. I don't think those are interesting or useful. But it is productive to critique the languages' relative strengths and weakness based on how they can be applied to a business problem.

Like the engineer from Coursera, I determined that PHP was, indeed, a "cake in the face," considering my needs and circumstances at the time.

Yeah, for example: PHP's accidental broken support for octal numbers is definitely the fault of all the people who use PHP, not a problem with the language.