Same experience. I've seen nice PHP projects on the internet, but not yet in RL. I know its possible, i guess its just that the language does not reward you for corecctness.

PHP used to actually have a performance penalty for splitting things up into modules and using object oriented design, because it meant loading and parsing more files on each request.

I was trying to do that on my first big PHP project, and got called out. The architect said "your code is too good, PHP is for writing crap". If you are going to write good code, you should do it in another language.

Symfony framework is a great example of a PHP framework written by Java programmers. All the same verbosity as Java, but without the benefits of Java.

Ok? I've seen projects go pear-shaped in probably 20 different programming languages at this point, and I guess after a certain point of experience, you start to realize that failures seldom have to do with the programming languages themselves, and more about the people actually writing and managing the code (and everything else around development).

When the 3 biggest disaster projects I've ever had to touch were all in PHP, I choose to believe that is a trend.

Yes, you can write bad code in any language.

PHP makes it hard NOT to. The footguns are all sitting out in the open, loaded, and the safeties are off.

Well, if you're not interested in factual discussions and you simply "choose to believe trends", all bets are off since you're pulling in your feelings about a programming language into your arguments. Hope all goes well for you anyway!

As a counter-point, the biggest disasters I've seen has been involving either C++ or C#, but in the end I think the reason they were disasters were because of the programmers (and their ego) rather than the programming languages they worked with. C++ is plenty open and without safeties, but that doesn't mean you have to use it like that.