TLDR; op blames awfull books that spread bad practices and then made PHP code ugly and insecure. I personally don't care about PHP. Now the PHP community is kinda funny. Basically there are the people that use PHP as poor man's java, that feel the need to write 50 design patterns per file, who hates the other part of the community, the one that couldn't care less about "software engineering best practices". So it's not much that people hate PHP, more like PHP developpers hate other PHP devel

I think PHPs big strength is the other point mentioned in the post: It enabled lots of people who are not really programmers to do some programming. Some of them developed into serious developers, some of them didn't. Being able to produce something slightly meaningful even without any skill is a big accomplishment, but it also means loads of erros, over estimated skill levels, security holes, unreadable code etc. The reason this doesn't happen to Haskel is that you become a computer scientist f

Most of my hate is not directed at PHP but rather the code of the projects I run across written in PHP. It's not uncommon for there to be random whitespace and code thrown everywhere with no heed to a sensible MVC or other software architectural pattern. I do occasionally run into well written and maintained software written in PHP and, while it's not my prefered language, it's quite readable and I can work with it. PHP does have it's issues but they are exacerbated by the general community th

PHP is awesome. It's so easy, i never had to read a book about it. Powers the web, and is ubiquitous. Sweet deal, instead of learning 10 different trendy languages every year, i stuck to it for more than 13 years now, and learned other much more important stuff. Wanna do something too complex? You wouldn't use a scripting language for that anyway. There's a tool for everything in PHP and it's fast. PHP made me money, i havent found something that's better overall.

A lack of decent tutorials and resources to learn PHP is something the language really suffers from. Google "PHP tutorial" and almost everything you get is completely awful and uses 12-year-old (as in, from 12 years ago) programming practices. Heck, even the PHP manual tutorial is downright awful and desperately needs updating.