A while back there was an article that put a negative spin on PHP ("PHP: a fractal of bad design") and there was a huge community response to it with over 1400 comments on the post itself. Over on the DevShed forums, there's a lengthy new post that goes back over that article, piece by piece, and evaluates everything that was said.

As I've seen this article a number of times, I'd like to go through it to see what everyone has to say on the subject. Warning: This is just stupidly, ludicrously long. it takes an existing 5-page article and tears it apart nearly sentence-by-sentence.

He goes back through each of the sections - Stance, Arguments, Philosophy, etc - and includes quotes from the articles and his own impressions/thoughts about them. There's a section covering some of the individual complaints that were mentioned and things like PHP's OOP model and security.