The bad rap was probably due to older versions. I used to program PHP in a professional setting (quite a while ago) and it basically interchangeable as any other system script (bash) executed by a parent http server process.
The language itself at the time was mostly useful because you could execute a script made of HTML (or anything really) with some embedded magic tags interpreted as PHP instead of the opposite where you had to do some sort of template engine.
The language itself at the time was mostly useful because you could execute a script made of HTML (or anything really) with some embedded magic tags interpreted as PHP instead of the opposite where you had to do some sort of template engine.