If you have complete control over your programmatic infrastructure and you are getting PHP 'cake in the face' you shouldn't blame PHP. You're just a shitty programmer.
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.