One thing I like about PHP 7 is that they had an opportunity to say "Fuck BC" and chose to use this version change to obsolete the shitty tutorials that make bad programmers (mysql_*).
Every reddit post about PHP outside /r/php ends up with it as well.
The language development is bad. Some developers are bad. Many users are bad. Does these points make the language bad? Yes. New features are incoherent and seemingly random, issues pop in and out (and back in) because tests simply fail, there are unexplainable security issues, documentation is bad, and if you look for any help (documentation comments, stackoverflow) you meet the users and their shitty tips.
Response to every criticism is "you just need to learn something". Does that make a good language? No. It's precisely what makes it bad.
PS: There's a nice subreddit for fun and laughs /r/lolphp - there are continuously new things as the language evolves, so the shittiness is not going away
Do you think there's a reason for that? Maybe a direct one? That it's a bad language for example? Why would it need to be anything more complicated than that.
So I don't think your guess is accurate. It's simply a bad language on its own. No need to compare it to anything. And I don't think anyone can deny that, no one will honestly say that "php is a good language". You can say it has some good features, or that it's good for certain tasks, or perhaps that it's better.. but that's all.
