In a new post to his blog Pádraic Brady wonders if PHP should be more equated to innocent villagefolk or a pillagin' pirate:

What PHP excels at is tireless consumption. Marathon races make one hungry and we can't help but notice the feasts being exposed by Rubyland or Pythonville as they do their best to sprint past us. Without that thieving spirit, PHP would long since have entered obscurity as a quaint HTML oriented scripting language used by college students to build cheap websites with flashing text and under construction GIFs. [...] Our strength lies in our ability to connect the dots several hundred times over to the point where the best dot connector gains a critical mass of adoption.

He talks about how most PHP developers seem to like doing things the hard way - reinventing the wheel, overstate personal preferences to the point of argument, ignoring best practices and promoting the bad ones.

He even suggests a possible new creed for PHP developers:

What we really need is a new PHP motto. Something deep and meaningful that exposes PHP's true nature. I was thinking "Rob 'em blind, matie!" would be a good one but I remembered that we need to cater for the Enterprise audience. Suggestions welcome.