Having dealt with a lot of really awful PHP in my programming career (including some of my earlier stuff), it tends to unfairly taint my view of the language.

Having dealt with a lot of really awful PHP in my programming career (including some of my earlier stuff), it tends to unfairly taint my view of the language. It's not terrible, but I've found that the clunky syntax for slightly more advanced stuff (e.g. anonymous blocks) really discourages some labor-saving and repetition-avoiding coding practices that a language like Ruby encourages. It's a really good fit for small-scale sites with well-defined requirements. But it requires some well-thought-out conventions to scale well, the sort of stuff you can't come up with unless you've done it wrong a couple of times yourself. Unless you borrow someone else's work by using one of the frameworks out there.