On DZone.com today there's a new post from Eric Hogue talking about the love-hate relationship he has with PHP (as a developer of five years with it).

I have been programming in PHP for 5 years now. I did not choose this language, I had to learn it to work on the code of the company my bosses bought. Since I started, I heard many rants about how bad PHP is. Some where valid, but a lot of them are just blaming the language for bad code written by bad programmers. I am by no mean an expert in programming languages or PHP, but here is my take on the language I use every day.

His "good" section mentions one of the most popular things about the language - its quality of documentation. He also talks about the interactive shell and the community that surrounds the language. In the "bad" category, though, he points out things like the low barrier for entry ("a blessing and a curse"), the changing order of parameters in function calls and that a constructor of a child class doesn't automatically call the parent's constructor.