Serious Answer: PHP in itself is not that bad, despite some discussable decisions in function naming and arguments order to name a few. The biggest problem, is that it has a settings file describing how it works (php.ini) and that sh*t will bite you in the rear when you move apps from server to server, where all the libs are different etc…
PHP never works out of the box when moving something on a new server, that is the worst part of the language.
Maybe the issue in your example isn't related to "how bad PHP is" but is to "how bad the code you're referring to is". Never had those kind of issues and yes obviously you've to know what extensions an application is using, but once again, modern PHP applications usually use composer as dependency manager and will gave those specified inside the project.
Good on you to not have to maintain legacy code (15years+).
Also, as a comparison, with JAVA, I have a legacy JAVA 1.5 to maintain, as far as you have the runtime, that stuff works, and that's it. This is how it should be.
Serious Answer: PHP in itself is not that bad, despite some discussable decisions in function naming and arguments order to name a few. The biggest problem, is that it has a settings file describing how it works (php.ini) and that sh*t will bite you in the rear when you move apps from server to server, where all the libs are different etc… PHP never works out of the box when moving something on a new server, that is the worst part of the language.
Maybe the issue in your example isn't related to "how bad PHP is" but is to "how bad the code you're referring to is". Never had those kind of issues and yes obviously you've to know what extensions an application is using, but once again, modern PHP applications usually use composer as dependency manager and will gave those specified inside the project.
Good on you to not have to maintain legacy code (15years+). Also, as a comparison, with JAVA, I have a legacy JAVA 1.5 to maintain, as far as you have the runtime, that stuff works, and that's it. This is how it should be.
I do, the difference is that, unlike Ruby code bases, it happens to be supported languages that evolved and perform better today.