Most of the rants against PHP don't have many specific technical reasons mentioned. Some do, but when you provide specific facts it's much easier to argue against them. So I think it's more convenient to stick with "PHP sucks."
My theory is that people ranting about PHP are mainly in three categories - the first being developers who have never used PHP. The second are people who used PHP back in 1998 and haven't never really checked out any any modern PHP frameworks. The rest are developers who inherit a horrible codebase written in PHP. So they're gripes are a combination of their own horribly-written codebase they're stuck maintaining along with PHP-specific complaints.
PHP definitely has its quirks but there is interesting work happening with the language and many frameworks. I do quite a bit of PHP coding at the moment but previously in my career I've been full time Java developer, C# developer and even now I write quite a lot of Objective C. I have hated things about every one of those platforms. Every one of them offers the opportunity to write horrible code. I think developers tend to be very judgmental and opinionated anyway, but PHP gets too much flak. If you're not using it then who cares, why should it bother you what other people are doing?
My theory is that people ranting about PHP are mainly in three categories - the first being developers who have never used PHP. The second are people who used PHP back in 1998 and haven't never really checked out any any modern PHP frameworks. The rest are developers who inherit a horrible codebase written in PHP. So they're gripes are a combination of their own horribly-written codebase they're stuck maintaining along with PHP-specific complaints.
PHP definitely has its quirks but there is interesting work happening with the language and many frameworks. I do quite a bit of PHP coding at the moment but previously in my career I've been full time Java developer, C# developer and even now I write quite a lot of Objective C. I have hated things about every one of those platforms. Every one of them offers the opportunity to write horrible code. I think developers tend to be very judgmental and opinionated anyway, but PHP gets too much flak. If you're not using it then who cares, why should it bother you what other people are doing?