I'd agree that PHP really isn't that bad (at least, from the perspective of someone who started writing web apps using C, Perl, and Java). Some missing or clunk

I'd agree that PHP really isn't that bad (at least, from the perspective of someone who started writing web apps using C, Perl, and Java). Some missing or clunky meta/higher level features feel limiting to me, but more or less it seems to be as successful as its other dynamic scripting siblings when it comes to tools devs have used to ship. The big problem with PHP is that it grew to popularity as it grew into a turing-complete templating language, and the major paradigm for it was more or less the idea that documents are programs. That actually encouraged mixture of logic and presentation concerns. There are some other warts possibly worth railing at, but that's really the main place it gets its probably deserved reputation for having more spaghetti code, even though pros working in have long since moved on from that paradigm. FWIW, this is also its strength: it's a very short distance with a gentle curve from authoring documents to authoring dynamic documents. I don't think anything else matches it. Of course, the curve from there to a larger application, that can be a different story, depending on what kind of guidance one has (and most likely, without guidance, ontology will recapitulate philology, as they say).