So, I generally don't wade into this argument. I've been programming for 27 years, 12 of that professionally. In that time I've used a lot of languages for a lot of projects. Every language is capable of being used to shoot yourself in the foot TBH. The hate that PHP gets is, IMHO, mostly from the fact that it's a gateway language and as such often has a higher WTF per minute rate for the code you find than many other languages. Anyway, on to what made me post this.

> its construction actively encourages bad code

That's a statement that needs a reference to back it up.