With the number of "PHP sucks" opinions articles out there, it's nice to see one claiming the opposite. In this new article on the KnowledgeTree blog Daniel Chalef covers a few reasons he thinks the language doesn't deserve the bad press it sometimes gets.
From its original design as a way to create dynamic web pages, PHP has evolved into a language (and supporting environment) that is particularly well suited to rapidly developing web-scale applications. Examples of these include Facebook and Wikipedia. Unfortunately, its genesis prevented it from being taken seriously as an enterprise-grade language and environment, especially when compared to the incumbent 800 pound gorilla, Java. [...] Over the last two years much has changed.
He mentions the improvements in the language itself like a better object model and the encouragement of more structured development practices. Frameworks like the Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter have gone a long way to help the language grow into the enterprise-level, powerful language it's become.