As a PHP advocate, I'm sure people will hate this comment, but PHP is not that bad of a language. It is just used terribly by thousands of sub-par developers.

As a PHP advocate, I'm sure people will hate this comment, but PHP is not that bad of a language. It is just used terribly by thousands of sub-par developers. Given a really good web framework, it can become quite elegant. Of course, you can always stray from the course and just hack at things to get them to work, but that destroys the point of using a framework. The problem isn't PHP, it's the people writing PHP. And I get the argument that the language should help facilitate good practices, but it's like Atheism; if you're an atheist, you don't believe you're going to Hell, but that doesn't mean you just do terrible things because you have no fear of Hell. If you are generally a good person, you'll do good things. If you are generally a good programmer, you can write good applications, no matter the language. Obviously, there are other things that make PHP awkward, inconsistent, and feel like a hack sometimes. But a good programmer will try to avoid those issues and instead find a better, more elegant solution. I'm sure a good number of people will disagree with me on this.