PHP wasn’t a programming language. It was created by one guy in 1994 as a set of website tools: handle basic authentication, very crude HTML templating, logging, and form submission (hard to do at the time; websites ran on C and Perl programs called by early servers using a protocol called CGI. It was very hard to do anything useful this way on the web). The second version was more like Twig or {{ mustache }}: handle the very basic logic of HTML templates; magically bind HTML form elements to variables (which is why PHP was also called “Forms Interpreter” at the time). As luck would have it, programmers with more skill than the original creators discovered this tool and turned it into a Turing-complete scripting language. This was the third version. It spread like wildfire and came to power most of the Internet because A) computer science majors weren’t interested in web development at the time, so the resources to build dynamic websites with “real” programming languages were limited; B) PHP has properties (e.g. when you crash a PHP program, you don’t take down the server with it) that made it ideal for shared, low-cost web hosts at the time; C) PHP worked well with Linux, MySQL, and Apache, so you’d have a free and open source stack that came together nicely; D) the competing platforms that emerged to try to “do things right” and replace PHP were even worse (ColdFusion, for instance).

Problem is, the language was never designed. It grew organically by accretion, to fill immediate needs. It thus has a number of inconsistencies in the naming/signature of functions. Some of the modules built into the language are also ancient and frustrating to use (SOAP clients and servers). So, people complained about how awful the language was, culminating in a blog post called “PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design,” from a long time ago. It became a rite of passage for junior developers to dump on PHP and also dismiss its developers as fake/“not real” programmers somehow. Also: the low barrier to entry and flexibility of the language let you write bad, procedural, insecure code that mixed HTML and inline JavaScript and SQL into one giant ball of mud; many of the tutorials available for PHP in the 2000s explicitly taught developers to do things the wrong way (leading to SQL injection among other vulnerabilities).

However, since about PHP 5.3 (which was a long time ago), the maintainers modernized their development practices somewhat (formal language specification; regular release schedule). They have since been regularly adding features that improve the language (namespaces; gradual typing; enums; immutability; Java-like attributes), and removing dangerous or unnecessary ones. The scripting engine was also rewritten to be much faster and memory efficient; later, just-in-time compilation was added to rewrite at least a portion of PHP programs to machine-native code on the fly. Also, the tooling is much better (PHPStan + Psalm at a compile step that checks the type safety of your code, and even support for additional language features like generics; new runtimes like RoadRunner greatly improve performance versus the old way of executing PHP as an Apache module).

In summary: 1) PHP got a lot of criticism. A lot of it was fair. A lot of it ignored the crazy Dot Com Boom context in which it emerged, and the fact that it had to be accessible to beginners or non-programmers to gain mindshare 2) PHP had major problems and limitations, many of which were addressed; many people, however, have not updated their perception of the language because they haven’t used it in years 3) PHP retains frustrations and limitations (like all programming languages), but is still a good choice for web projects. 4) Language choice is a little overrated anyhow. If your product fails, it’s probably not because you chose PHP versus Node JS (or vice versa) for your backend 5) Don’t let blog posts or Redditors dictate the language you use. If you enjoy PHP, use it unashamedly, and without desperately seeking validation for your preference (which a lot of PHP devs do). If you don’t like it, there are plenty of good alternatives now