Ha! It's a pendulum that swings in both directions, and I think people are moving on from wasting their time and energy complaining about PHP. Here's what I have learned.
1. Developers complain a lot, and that's a good thing. While it can seem unproductive at times and devolve into flame wars, the truth is you're not likely to choose this profession if you aren't curious and care about the right damn thing happening.
It's just a byproduct of what it takes to be a good dev. We research, we understand, and then we want to stand by our opinions because of that research and understanding. But we can also get lost in that sometimes. It's important to have pragmatism in our toolbelt.
At the end of the day, core maintainers or contributors make sure to cherry pick the best from those arguments. Pull requests are made. Merges happen. Things improve. It's not always pretty, but discourse is like that.
2. The world isn't perfect. Neither are languages. PHP has its share of rough spots, but then it's how you use it. We've all seen some truly awful Ruby on Rails code, just as we've seen some solid, testable PHP code. Your job is understand the deficiencies of a language (any language!) and craft the best code around those limitations.
3. Shiny new things give us blinders. The antithesis to ad hoc PHP might be Ruby on Rails. Yet people discount some drawbacks that are unique (from PHP) to RoR. Do generators, which are encouraged, really help teach a programmer about how their application stack is operating? Maybe you could tell someone to avoid scaffolding. Is Rails faster than well-architected PHP? Hell no, but maybe you could teach someone how to tweak middleware or use JRuby. But you'll notice the same pattern I mentioned in #2: understand deficiencies, create workarounds to those limitations. It's not unique to PHP, or any other language/framework.
And finally...
4. When you are building things meant to be consumed by the general public, more goes into a language decision than the features of that language. You might, for example, have a business requirement to hire up and move very quickly. Are you going to round up a bunch of seasoned, veteren Go engineers in a few weeks to build the next sprint of some great app? It's probably not impossible, but it's not likely either (today). The trick is to solve the problems you actually have.
I'm not advocating everyone use PHP. I'm advocating everyone use the language that best suits their personal or larger business needs. If you care about improving PHP, help make it better. We, the general dev community, are all too busy, considerate, awesome, hard-working, friendly, and creative to spend much time on flame wars. :)
