Saw this over on StackOverflow, and it made me laugh. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/309300/defend-php-convince-me-it-isnt-horrible

I’ve seen this same question asked about just every language out there. Like this one it usually has a long list of well thought out complaints about the design of the language. You have to commend the writers of these posts for the time and effort put into them, and I think they might be useful for anyone considering learning whichever language that it might be about.

However, no matter what the language, the answer is usually the same. There are thousands of people who can write an application fast with this language than they can with any other. PHP has Facebook and Yahoo! as examples. Perl has the nifty DuckDuckGo search engine, as well as Movable Type. just about any application written on appengine is written in Java or Python. So, really, if you don’t like the language, move on and learn another that is more appealing to you. Why stop and put the time into complaining about it?