Modern PHP really isn&#x27;t all that bad, I still wouldn&#x27;t recommend people go into PHP development out of fear that they might stumble into one of the pre-modern hellholes that I only barely escaped in the early days of my career.<p>It&#x27;s almost an irrational fear, but I remember working on plugins for applications where plugin hooks were non-existent, and the canonical approach was to patch code. I remember applications where there was no frontend server, but rather a sprawl of PHP files each doing one thing and hooking into the &#x27;main&#x27; system via a &#x27;require settings.php&#x27;.<p>Apart from that, working within PHP still obliges you to do a lot of hairy things---like working with Drupal. Now Drupal is certainly better architected than say Mambo&#x2F;Joomla ever was, but it&#x27;s still a better CMS than it is a web framework and for some odd reason lots of companies insist on building things into Drupal even today.<p>Now ... all of my recent knowledge is second hand, I&#x27;ve been out of PHP and into Python for at least 5 years now