[davidw]

I'm a web developer too, and I've worked with PHP professionally. It's not a great language in terms of features, but there are worse.

One of the good things about PHP is that it has a very low barrier to entry, making it easy for people to get up and running.

I think, though, that that sometimes leads to one reason why people dislike it: a company gets up and running (which is a good thing) on a hideous pile of crap codebase (not so good) and then decides to hire some more serious developers.

I've been in that position, and it is not fun.