13-year-old kids still in high school styling themselves as "PHP Developers" is what gave PHP a bad rap. They're the reason PHP-Nuke existed. But novice developers produce mediocre code irrsepective of the language.
I'm not saying it's the best thing ever created. I've never used PHP 5 but there's not really anything fundamentally wrong with PHP4 other than clunky syntax and stupid choices in naming some intrinsic functions. It's certainly easier to hang yourself with, say, C than with PHP.