OneAndOneIs2

Perhaps because it's often associated with HTML, which is often sneered at for "not being a real programming language" - I'll pay that, it's really a metalanguage, an xml sort of thing. Perhaps PHP is tainted by association?

That said, people sneer at all sorts of languages for "not being real programming languages" much like people sneer at things like VW beetles for "not being real cars"

clearly a bike is not a real car... but a VW is still a car! (Even though it's not a Ferrari)

I agree! The issue is that web programming probably has extremely small barriers to entry for new programmers leading to a lot of script kiddies whacking stuff out. Often some "bad" practices are seen. It doesn't mean PHP is a bad language though - it's the best thing to use for any webapp and even though it doesn't enforce some good behavior (which I believe is a feature, not a bug) it can be used in quite complex web systems. It's just elitism at play.

But quite honestly web development is becoming a lot more complex than it once was with the web maturing - it's no longer just passing variables from page to page.

PHP got a bad reputation for allowing some bad design decisions like unsafe defaults and allowing far-too-newbie friendly features like "magic quotes" which is dangerous to rely on blindly.

You can program powerful scripts in PHP without fully understanding the underlying communication. It's too high level in some ways. Perl and Python are general purpose languages and hence are more low level than PHP. Also Perl always assumes user input is unsafe until explicitly marked as safe, whereas you can use unsafe (GET and POST) variables in PHP without warning.

It's not that you cannot write security-conscious code in PHP. It is that it was - and to some extent is - all too easy to write bad code in PHP.

PHP 5 is a lot better than PHP 4 in this regard though.

@Alison: There are really people who think HTML was supposed to be a programming language?? What do they think the M in the acronym stands for??

@Dion & Hari: Yeah, that makes sense. If every piece of bad code you come across is written in a certain language, then it'd be natural enough to come to dislike the language by association!

I personally like PHP. It's free form and productivity is amazing. However, writing well organized, scalable code is tougher.

Python is nice too, but not easy to use for web applications unless you learn a Python framework (Zope etc) or pure CGI programming.

Why does it suck?
Typeless types, idiot scoping rules, broken variable arguments with functions, object-orientism, weird arrays (keys are one-way), no structs. You'll be writing spaghetties before you know it.