Still, that's not going to do much to change public perception, and I guess that's somewhat fair. PHP has earned it's reputation, even if many (but not all) criticism are now largely dated.
I'm just happy I switched to working on other languages, aside from the occasional Laravel-based side projects.
I was curious and wanted to see if that is the case. So I checked for the most basic thing. The arrow notation for lambdas. Surely they must've added that by now. Surely they must've added that before Java did. Nope, still RFC. Now I wonder if it's idiomatic to pass those "long form" lambdas around when writing in functional style or is it something nobody does. In any event this little discovery makes me think parent's sentiment seems to be still justified.
Is public perception the reason you are happy to be mostly using something else now, though?
I really enjoy some of the more flexible syntax and design choices present in some other languages. It also help that various job requirements over the year have required that I build a broader skillset. Finally, the growth I've experienced by stepping outside my comfort zone the past few years is probably the best benefit, which is a good experience regardless of which language(s) you start with.
In the end, however, as we both know, most decisions in software development are an exercise in managing tradeoffs. I guess the core of my argument is that, in the past few years, PHP has done a great job at improving its balance of tradeoffs.
If you think PHP is looked down on by those who care about language features because of a popularity context, rather than because of asinine language decisions and limited support for modern programming paradigms, I think it's you who is missing it. Since any program can technically be written in any (Turing Complete) language, the fact that some big sites were made to work with PHP also sort of misses the point. When most of the big "success stories" adopted PHP, options for web-friendly open source languages were much thinner. Now if you look at the new development projects they highlight, you don't see PHP come up that much. Facebook, for example, is prominently using Haskell. I don't know anyone who both programs in Haskell and is willing to touch PHP.
Of course, many thoughtful criticisms of PHP have been discussed on HN. e.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ & http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2011/11/php-sucks-but-some-f....