It took me some time using PHP to realize it wasn't as bad as its bad rep had lead me to believe. It's old, it has been through a lot of changes, most of them

It took me some time using PHP to realize it wasn't as bad as its bad rep had lead me to believe. It's old, it has been through a lot of changes, most of them great improvements (although leaving some ambiguities behind, I admit) and it's so wildly popular on the web that the amount of disastrous coding and outdated information spread is a mess to deal with and discourages a lot of people who take software development seriously. Personal Home Pages has its original purpose stated on its name and it used to be something you wouldn't want to be endorsing on a multi billion USD web service with millions of users. Yet, PHP has become much more than a language for adding some cool web forms, a guest book and some other dynamic content on amateur home pages uploaded to shared hosting services. We still have a hard time taking seriously any programmer who starts saying (s)he codes on PHP. Many of them can run in circles around me and any other developer any time with their skills, and I don't think their language of choice should have any impact on the judgment we do on their abilities or the quality of the software they build. I still prefer many other languages over PHP but now I see them as just preferences (sometimes more or less appropriate, depending on the context), not better or worse choices. Let the kids fight over which language is the coolest, I just want to get the work done.