In case you missed it (there's been a good bit of buzz about it in the PHP community lately) there's a recent post from Jeff Atwood about the PHP language and some of his thoughts on its usefulness, it's structure and some of this thoughts on the usual "PHP sucks" kinds of articles.

Remember the immediate visceral reaction you had to the double-clawed hammer? That's exactly the reaction most sane programmers have to their first encounter with the web programming language PHP. This has been going on for years.

He talks about the the anti-PHP rants that have been happening (over and over) for years, his thoughts on it being the "worst designed mainstream 'language'" out there...and how the discussion doesn't need to be around these points anymore. It needs to be about how to get programmers to use better tooling (whether or not PHP is the right tool for the job).

Of course, there's no shortage of comments on a post like this, so be sure to go through them and see the various reactions to Jeff's thoughts.