Its bad rep was well deserve with PHP 4 and below. It wasn't OOP at the start and had weird warts. As PHP mature it's much better than its past and have fixed

Its bad rep was well deserve with PHP 4 and below. It wasn't OOP at the start and had weird warts. As PHP mature it's much better than its past and have fixed some complaints but unfortunately the bad rep still stuck. Plus there are some fundamental warts that you can't just fix. In general, I'm happy that PHP is thriving and continue to improve. It looked bleak for a while and I regretted choosing PHP over Python or Ruby for web dev. I find that it doesn't matter much if you're using MVC frameworks such as Laravel. You hardly need to memorize or use crazy stuff with PHP and most of the time you're just googling framework stuff how to grab param from route, etc... I've done Scala Play framework that that language get in the way a lot on top of googling how to do stuff with play framework. But I suspect that this observation is because more of dynamic language vs type language more than PHP vs Scala. -- I think in general it's just language evolve and got better. Perl started web dev and then PHP was better then Python came along and after that Ruby. With each subsequent programming languages the languages got prettier and had more thoughts into the design.