PHP is not that bad ..

Only a lot of "developers" are bad in using PHP.

PHP has come a long way, and I use to have a good stream of gigs come my way for Drupal and WordPress jobs.

It's just not sexy or fun like Ruby or Node, so the fanboys (like me) love to hate it. We all need an enemy, right?

PHP is like Nickelback. Hating it makes you cool.

@harambae re: debugging, it sounds like you just need to set things up properly or use a decent framework that does that stuff for you.
Otherwise you're just bitching about semantics and personal preference.