There's a whole generation of programmers out there that couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper back without the help of an IDE telling them what function parameters go where.
And in C I also still can't remember if the fwrite call takes (buffer, sizeof(element), nelements, fp) or (buffer, nelements, sizeof(element), fp).
This is all about religion, the PHP church has a large number of followers and it's 'bible' contains some arguably wrong pages, so those in other churches will go out of their way to shake their heads at all the fools in the PHP church when it's clear to everyone else that their religion is broken.
Meanwhile the PHP guys will simply get the job done and take home the loot.
I can program in lots of languages but for quick & dirty stuff (and don't tell me everything you write is of world class importance) it is very well suited, if you're disciplined you can take it to considerable heights before you run out of steam.