In an "interesting" post to The Codist blog, there's one developer's look at PHP and his confession that he'll never quite understand the appeal of the language.
How PHP can be so popular is beyond me; the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql (as in the below example) into a single file is a nightmare.
He Goes on to talk about his experience with JSP versus PHP and some perspectives on how PHP lacks features he's used to or how other developers he's talked to had similar issues.
One thing that concerns me (and apparently several others in the PHP community) is that he keeps talking about procedural PHP code that's an "all in one page" kind of setup. Well, of course this can get messy quickly - that's no way to code anything, much less PHP. Organization means more than just breaking code up into chunks on your page (though it's a very low-level start). Plus, the sample code he provides is a joke - a PHP developer with a few weeks of experience could push out something 10x better.
Anyone who thinks one language is superior to another simply hasn't programmed long enough or diversified their skillset to realize that is almost impossible.
The example in which the blogger gave (although I didn't see it -- link down?) sounds to me like a classic case of a transaction script, which not ideal for many situations is a perfectly suitable solution for simple cron or install scripts.