Is PHP a bad programming language? No, it is not. The only bad thing about PHP is the programmer who doesn’t know how to use it. So, why people say that PHP is ugly? Well, I thing it is mostly because PHP is the most popular language for web development, and, so there are many people who want to learn how to “build a webpage” and the first thing that Google returns, -besides HTML/CSS-, is PHP, so there, there you have thousands of people writing (very bad) PHP without the slightest knowledge of programming fundamentals. Of course there are many other great choices for to build a good web application: Ruby, NodeJS, Python, but PHP is still in the arena, we just need to learn how to use it properly, along with good practices.