[dgunay]

Used to really like PHP.

I liked it because it was my first serious programming language out of college. I worked in it every day at my first job. I followed its progress closely and advocated for migrating to PHP 7 ASAP. I wrote numerous hobby projects in it (including one that ironically helped me get my current job, years after I had stopped using PHP).

I stopped liking it as much after I just got more exposure to all the different languages out there and what they were good at. PHP doesn't deserve its reputation anymore but there are some things it will just never be great at, and that's OK. I stopped liking dynamic languages as much in general, and started preferring statically typed ones.

I learned so much about general web standards and core backend web dev skills by implementing various services in PHP. HTTP, FTP (and its various flavors), JSON, XML, regex, etc.