Yes, so everybody says, but I prefer forming my own opinion!

I simply don't like to call something that millions of programmers work with "pigs guts" if I haven't actually looked at it for about a decade.

But Cobol isn't used by 25% of all websites. It's just a tool, one that learning will give you access to a large share of jobs on the market.

Plus, who cares if anyone learns Cobol? If they want to, there is not reason to stop them.

The numbers tell a different story. Wordpress powers 25% of the entire web. That is a quarter of the entire internet. It's pretty much your opinion vs the entire internet.

You can see how your opinions come off as ludicrous ?

Not really. How many owners of those 25% of web sites are programmers who have any opinion whatsoever about programming languages?

Who cares about the coding language when the market is telling you otherwise? Isn't that the very essence of starting a startup, YCombinator, the whole Silicon Valley mantra? Listen to your customers.

The customers are telling you PHP is preferred to other languages and is here to stay as evidenced by 25% of the web using a single PHP application as the backend.

No the customers are saying they like the product (wordpress). They couldn't give a rat's ass what it's written in.

I won't argue that the language makes the framework popular. But if Wordpress serves 25% of the entire web, Facebook serves 1/7th of the entire world population every single day, and 500M people visit Wikipedia a month, clearly something about PHP works. Perhaps it attracts a certain kind of personality that gets things done, or perhaps its flexibility is what makes it successful, but to call the most influential programming language of this generation pig guts is willful ignorance.

Or perhaps it was easy to learn for novices, or easy to deploy...

This is a straw man. Citing 2 popular web sites and 1 application doesn't mean PHP is a well designed language. You could just as well have picked 2 other web sites written in Java to argue that PHP is rubbish.

I wouldn't even call it influential, unless language developers have been inspired about how not to design a language. Popular, yes, but not influential. I don't see anything from it being incorporated into other languages. It generally seems to have been playing catch up in terms of features, in a similar way to javascript (where there it's less about catch-up and more about breaking out of the browser & supporting OO).