PHP is the textbook example of worse is better. It shows two important things:
1. The success of a programming language has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with raw capability, ie. what does the language make dramatically easier.
2. Technical warts will not prevent great things from being done in a language. It's certainly true that Haskell will not allow you write as broken a piece of software as PHP, but in many cases you can write something just as elegant in PHP as you can in Haskell (laziness/pattern-matching/type-inference notwithstanding).
Now, personally I will do my best to ever write any PHP again, and if someone asks me my opinion I'll tell them that I believe using PHP exclusively will stunt your growth as a software craftsmen. But those are just opinions. I don't feel the need to go out and advocate against PHP because the software communities where I devote my attention are doing just fine. If somebody likes PHP then more power to them, it certainly won't prevent them from doing great things.
1. The success of a programming language has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with raw capability, ie. what does the language make dramatically easier.
2. Technical warts will not prevent great things from being done in a language. It's certainly true that Haskell will not allow you write as broken a piece of software as PHP, but in many cases you can write something just as elegant in PHP as you can in Haskell (laziness/pattern-matching/type-inference notwithstanding).
Now, personally I will do my best to ever write any PHP again, and if someone asks me my opinion I'll tell them that I believe using PHP exclusively will stunt your growth as a software craftsmen. But those are just opinions. I don't feel the need to go out and advocate against PHP because the software communities where I devote my attention are doing just fine. If somebody likes PHP then more power to them, it certainly won't prevent them from doing great things.