For the record, I have been using PHP for years. Almost every web project I worked on ended up being written in PHP, and the same applies to the project I'm currently working on. Some may have noticed that this website, which had been rewritten in PHP recently, had suddenly switched to Python a few days ago.
This is the reason. Not that this fact, taken on its own, has a major bearing over how bad PHP is as a language. It's just the latest in a very long series of bad design decisions and, as far as I'm concerned, the drop that caused the ocean to yell, "Screw it guys, I'm going home".
A few years back, I was using PHP4, and I was quite annoyed with the (completely borked) OO system. Then PHP5 came along. A lot of improvement in there - objects were finally passed by reference automatically, and some new features had potential. Still, many of them were either borked or, which is probably worse, ill-designed from the start. "Oh well," I said, "I'll wait, it will improve over time."
And I was SO wrong.