PHP7 is ok. They rewrote the parser to use a real AST which fixed a lot of the weirdness and inconsistency, threw out a ton of deprecated stuff, and made error situations saner by replacing errors by throwables. I like also that php is gradually getting strict typing as an option. Function signatures are strictly typed now, with class properties getting it soon. Plus, PSR guidelines have made the popular libraries object-oriented, namespaced and consistent. My main complaint with php these days is that it's starting to look too much like java with dollar signs.