[ThePadawan]

I get it. Old PHP was a joke, so people (including me) are biased against it.

I would personally love to get beyond that bias. However, every single time I install any piece of software written in PHP, it's simply a nightmare (e.g. Matomo, rss-bridge).

Unhelpful error messages, unexplained or undocumented features, all held together with metaphorical duct tape.

I always have to dive into the source code to figure out things that a README or tutorial should be able to help me with.

I can't recall ever doing that with tools written in any other language.

Is it simply that PHP programmers care so little about their products?

[pdimitar]

It's likely a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and loving the syntax and maybe the enablement for quick iteration (and all 3 aren't specific to PHP at all).

I have the same opinion about Python btw. Just today I had to install a complex toolkit for flashing ROMs and you can guess that thing absolutely didn't work on the first try and I learned much more about "pip" than I ever wanted to.