You may have heard a few rumors going around...
"PHP is just a scripting language."
"It's only used by beginners."
"PHP always ends up as spaghe...
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Let me join the 15+ years club and dive into memories of the old times, being one of the „scripting kiddies“ guilty of writing HTML, PHP and MySQL in the same file. ;)
We definitely had some awful introductions into the language long ago, that I shouldn’t have read. The web was still relatively new and many people (like me) felt that it was more fun to just try coding with the ease of PHP, than to read programming books that have been so boring. I know better today.
In the meantime things really changed a lot and from large recipe websites (with a huge forum and community) to tracking APIs with billions of requests, I’ve written so many different applications in PHP in the past 15 years. It just works. We never had security issues (fingers crossed) and scalability was never as bad as people believed, even in the times when I was still driving new servers to the data center in my car.
But ... as you say ... so many people believe in the things they've heard in the old days. I get the „PHP is not a real programming language“ flag every few weeks. People tell me quite often that they learned it from someone with the real programming skills and that they never used the language themselves. It takes some time for them to understand that in 90% of all cases the chosen language isn’t the problem. I’ve seen horrible code in many languages - and the developers always believed they’re better than a scripting PHP guy. :)
PHP is often a hammer in search of a nail, but you can say that about any language. I've been using PHP (and the Laravel framework) on a recent project, and as long as you read the docs and have some coding standards in place, it's a joy to use
From one PHP dev to another, I salute and thank you. 8 years of experience, most of it using a well-formed framework, I always wondered why the hate for PHP. It really is unfounded nowadays.
Yet another dev with 15+ years in PHP here: Yes and no. PHP has improved a lot, but it's still very inconsistent as a language and it is just so much easier to maintain large applications in languages that are compiled and strictly typed. I'll actually open source something pretty large using PHP fairly soon, but I just can't wait to finish it and switch over to other tools.
On the plus side, the ecosystem (meaning packagist.org) is very good and the tooling is also not bad.