I attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf at a FOSS conference in 2006. It has been a long time, so I remember only a few things from the talk, but one thing I remember him talking about is how people love to complain about PHP, often on forums that are themselves written in PHP.

I know I used to have the impression of PHP as a messy language because I last worked with PHP4. It's come a long way since then, though I don't use it.