[agumonkey]

It was low performance, but not slow, its simple model meant it was performing enough for the task (DB IO was the bottleneck most of the time).

Since PHP5, the lead team made progress into making it solid. And in PHP7 some eastern/russian guy hacked the VM a lot. Adding new traits and improving memory usage and performance a lot too.

The "hatred" comes from old days (v3,v4):

  - massive inconsistency in naming
  - global side effect was a norm
  - bugs, bugs, bugs

Combined with the nascent web boom, tons of new kids (that includes me) started having fun with html/php. A large mass of the web was written with it, carrying all the bad design decisions in forms of security bugs and impossibly bad code.

ps: I audited one famous wordpress plugin and it was 10 pages long of redundant code in 3 big loops, dead code everywhere, commented code released in production. All this to add a few links here and there.