While I’m no fan of PHP, I feel like it gets a disproportionate amount of hate when there’s some clearly worse languages out there. Where’s the hate for Perl, Bash, Visual Basic, or Matlab (never mind specialty languages like Spice).

Or how about some controversial ones, to add some spice? C is often popular for it’s simplicity, but it’s arguably a terribly designed language. Undefined behavior is terrible. Pretty much no modern language makes the mistakes C made, so it’s pretty clear we’ve universally agreed it was bad design.

Or for another one, Lisp family languages are popular in academic circles, but does anyone truly think all those parentheses made for a practical language? I think the near absence of any modern software being built with Lisp family languages speaks for itself.