I think PHP is good for web development, but the syntax of the language is really bad for people who might potentially go on to learn more languages. One prime

I think PHP is good for web development, but the syntax of the language is really bad for people who might potentially go on to learn more languages. One prime example of the really bad sides of PHP is the ambiguity of collections contained within the PHP array(). Gone is the distinction of sets, linked lists, and maps -- they're all contained in this single, uniform data type. One frustration I encountered at a job this month was attempting to port some code from Java to PHP, but it was a performance hit because some of the Java code being dependent on these primitive data types that were unavailable in PHP's core infrastructure. I heard they've planned to release these primitive data types to resolve the ambiguity, but I have yet to see it released.