I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn't heard it before. [...] He didn't say the actual language was poor - he said it was the general culture surrounding the language, which is usually iconified by a language's founder, that seems to encourage bad practices. That is, PHP code bases tend to be hacky and unmaintainable.

He goes through a few things in PHP's past including the influence that Rasmus Lerdorf has had from the beginning and how the "pizza-faced adolescent years" of PHP have been a big part of the problem. Because of its past, PHP had been considered a "ghetto" but with recent improvements like encouragement of coding standards, full-stack frameworks, great unit testing tools and the same low barrier for entry, the language is gathering its strength and moving away from its past into something new.

From the Gartner post:

I just published a research note on PHP. Clients can find it here. The research note goes into *much* more detail but the overview is [in the rest of the post]. Keep in mind that this content is targeted at mainstream IT organizations. PHP has been a cornerstone technology on the Web for more than a decade. While its adoption among mainstream IT organizations has been limited in the past, many corporate application development (AD) projects are discovering the unique benefits of PHP.

Danne highlights two quotes that were of particular interest in the report - one from the quote above about PHP being a cornerstone of many corporate web application development and the other talking about PHP's role not just in backend application development but also it being useful in front-end toolsets too.