Most of the people defending PHP are talking about PHP7+, and most of the people hating PHP are talking about PHP5-. Both groups didn't experience what the oth

Most of the people defending PHP are talking about PHP7+, and most of the people hating PHP are talking about PHP5-. Both groups didn't experience what the other group did and they are not talking about the same thing. So it is kind of pointless discussion. The language itself has improved a lot. It is easy to find decent PHP7+ code now. It is also easy to find bad code. And that is the same for all major programming languages in terms of usage. As Java got more popular, it was easier to find crappy code everywhere from people that only learned inheritance from OOP. More projects mean more technical debt for the future. So you always find more critics against most popular ones.