I reserved judgement on PHP until I had to use it for a project a few years ago. I couldn't quite believe it was as bad as it was painted. Actually, it was worse. I've heard it has improved, but when I used it there were at least two incompatible regex engines and so many different, incompatible and quirky ways of doing the same thing it almost guarantees any line of code contains a subtle bug.

Pythonistas have a different and valid view of how code should be written ("The one true way") that runs in direct opposition to Perl's TIMTOWTDI. I'm sure Pythonistas would hate PHP where they simply dislike Perl.