It isn't just snobbery (though I'm not denying that there's going to be an element of that in the comments, languages make people get religious and weird). Being called in to do maintenance on a php project sends a stab of dread through the heart of an experienced programmer and it's worth understanding why. This article goes a long way towards doing so.

It's important to re-iterate what the article is NOT saying. It's not saying that you can't do awesome work in php, there's tons of great counterexamples. It's not saying that you can't change the world with php. It's not even saying that you can't write a maintainable, legible, beautiful app with php.

The problem with php is that the core language ignores a ton of what we as a community have learned about language design: Be consistent. Make it easy to do the right thing. Make unwise code look awkward. Pick a type system and embrace it. Don't try to magically do the right thing. Be predictable. Avoid action at a distance.

It's not that PHP makes for a great beginner language. So does Python. It's not that PHP has flaws, so does every language. Many darlings of the Hacker News crowd even have some of the flaws from this list. But I'd challenge you to make a list a quarter of the size of this one with Python, or Haskell, or frankly even Javascript.