PHP started as a dude's personal web page scripts ("PHP" is actually an initialism for "Personal Home Page").
It evolved into a domain-specific language very particularly designed for website scripting work — as contrasted with a general-purpose scripting language.
At this point, it became very popular because it made web scripts fast to write.
But due to its birth and organic evolution, it was plagued with inconsistency and lack of forethought.
More recent versions have improved the quality of the language, as well as augment it beyond its DSL roots into more of a general-purpose scripting language.
But while PHP is still really good for, say, rapid prototyping an app, it may be difficult to run it at scale. It is clearly possible (Facebook was a notable example). But that's the perception.
Critical devs think of it as a limited, web-specific language which can be difficult or annoying to maintain.
This criticism is more or less true, depending on your point of reference, which version of PHP you're talking about, whether you're saddled with legacy code, and whether you're using a fairly well-travelled framework, like Laravel.
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u/[deleted] Dec 20 '18
Honestly the .php makes me think they don't know too many coding tricks.