[IfOnlyYouKnew]

It's... ugly? I started with PHP, like many. And the documentation was excellent, as were deployment options. But even though familiarity tends to breed sympathy, it took me only five minutes of seeing Ruby to question why I ever put up with PHP. Just the need to prefix $variables alone is off-putting, and so were the inconsistancies in style. There were camelCase() functions, but also under_score(). Sometimes it was search_all(), then find_all(), next all_matching(). Some counting method might actually return 0, others nil (for zero matches). And I seem to remember one even returned the string "0".

(not actual examples–I have luckily forgotten)

[danmur]

For me (php5, older now I know) it was things like create_function() taking a string. It was (is? dunno) an ugly and crude language, no subtleties in the syntax, just warts. I'm firmly of the belief you can make good things with any language but I don't feel any desire to make things with PHP when there's other good options.