I've done some PHP development and I understand why it's so reviled. There seems to be a fairly huge gap between beginner difficulty and expert development. The greatest issue for me was the lack of a stack trace. Working on a feature would require editing some code, refreshing the page, seeing if it broke the website, rinse and repeat. The biggest reason I see for using PHP is to do wordpress development and even Matt Mullenweg himself has said it's time to "learn javascript deeply".