I fight against technologies I perceive as bad choices in an attempt to convince younger developers with less of an experience base that they should pick up something else that will give them the same or better capabilities for much less pain. My contribution to the community, as it were, as I have in turn benefited in my career from such signposting.

You can carve out a decent subset of PHP, but there's this painful and dangerous beginning and middle part where you're still learning this subset and in the meantime you're writing grossly insecure code. Perl has much the same problem. There are no languages I know where you are immediately writing brilliant code, but there's certainly ones you can learn faster, cut down the danger period, and also have many of the worst dangers ameliorated by much better design decisions at the API and language level. (How much of PHP and all similar languages would have been better if only the default interpolation HTML escaped everything and you had to especially ask for direct interpolation, instead of the other way around?)