Yes, but WordPress !== PHP. It's one of the worst examples of what PHP can look like and they resolutely refuse to adopt modern standards or improve in any way. They still use SVN too. Bunch of backwards troglodytes.
Modernizing that project would be a nightmare. It's maybe the code base with the most plug-ins, and they should be supported while deprecating and gradually phasibg them out.
I'm working with a client that's built more code in custom plug-ins than Wordpress itself, I'm ambivalent on them not using a more modern code. On one hand it's hard to work with what Wordpress is right now, on the other rewriting all of those plug-ins is a monumental task.
People sure like to dunk on PHP. I'll take whatever flak for this, but this is the kind of meme a .NET fanboy or Ruby on Rails bro would make when they haven't touched any languages other then their prescious, and don't know wtf they're talking about.
PHP, after all these years, is STILL running 78% of all sites. That's not because it's garbage or the worst. It's solid, reliable, mature and very well documented. And I say this as someone who has gladly moved to Python, but also work in in others.
Most of the hate for php was born back in version 3 or 4, when it was a mess. Also a lot of people who where in college in those years learned php as a first language.
Combine a language that does not enforce good coding practices and a lot of people making their first website, and you get some pretty horrible codebases.
As part of my job is to maintain legacy php websites, I've seen lovercraftian nightmares. I love modern php, but I get where all this hate is coming from.
People who say those things usually don't know the language very well or haven't used it at all. I see the same with JavaScript. I don't get why some programmers are so ignorant.
regular javascript is actually okay in my book. It's just node.js that I despise because of all it's weirdness. Javascript should just be able to be opened in a browser and run with no fuss.
The point of "esoteric" programming languages like Brainfuck or Befunge is to be a source of puzzles for people who enjoy that kind of puzzle. They're not "bad programming languages" any more than an escape room is a "bad apartment".
While I'm no fan of PHP, I feel like it gets a disproportionate amount of hate when there's some clearly worse languages out there. Where's the hate for Perl, Bash, Visual Basic, or Matlab (never mind specialty languages like Spice).
Or how about some controversial ones, to add some spice? C is often popular for it's simplicity, but it's arguably a terribly designed language. Undefined behavior is terrible. Pretty much no modern language makes the mistakes C made, so it's pretty clear we've universally agreed it was bad design.
Or for another one, Lisp family languages are popular in academic circles, but does anyone truly think all those parentheses made for a practical language? I think the near absence of any modern software being built with Lisp family languages speaks for itself.