I did PHP for many years before moving to Ruby and Rails and never looked back ... doing Ruby made me a much much better software Engineer and gave me a better

I did PHP for many years before moving to Ruby and Rails and never looked back ... doing Ruby made me a much much better software Engineer and gave me a better understanding of Computer Science as a whole. Its not impossible to get this with PHP, but the fact is that the low barrier to entry actually works against it. There are way more amateurs screwing around and writing really bad code with PHP than you'd find doing Ruby, Python and (more recently) Javascript (wasn't always the case though) PHP just has bad PR. It unfortunate, but its just the reality of the PHP ecosystem, and if you choose to program mainly in it, then its something that you have to accept and work hard to overcome. Weirdly enough, I find quite a few startups/tech companies that I wouldn't expect to use PHP actually do. Pocket. Slack. for example then the usual suspects like Facebook and Automattic (wordpress guys). From my experience following Ruby on Rails from the beginning till now ... I think the these using PHP are doing the ecosystem a massive disservice by not blogging more extensively about the awesome things they're doing with it and getting more word out about the right way to do things. Thats the only way I see the perception of PHP changing.