[godojo]

The bad rap was probably due to older versions. I used to program PHP in a professional setting (quite a while ago) and it basically interchangeable as any other system script (bash) executed by a parent http server process.

The language itself at the time was mostly useful because you could execute a script made of HTML (or anything really) with some embedded magic tags interpreted as PHP instead of the opposite where you had to do some sort of template engine.

[acdha]

Older versions were worse but the current versions still have a lot of cultural baggage around the idea that ignoring errors is great and that's it's helpful to automagically convert data types. Changing that would break a huge amount of code and habit so the community is kind of slow-walking in that direction by deprecating features, adding opt-in config, and using linters to identify likely sources of problems.

I don't disagree that it was useful — especially for having such a simple “upload a file, hit refresh” workflow — but popularity can work against you when it encourages optimizing for easy starts over long-term maintainability and a huge number of people learned dubious habits and aren't quick to switch.