I haven't used it for a long while, but I did a LOT of PHP5, several years. In my opinion PHP4 was horrific (from a language/standard library perspective, most languages you can get what you want done regardless of that), a lot of it carried over into PHP5 despite being a lot better (e.g. see phpsadness). Then the fiasco that was 6/7/whatever made it really hard to have confidence in the future of PHP.

No idea how recent PHP is. It's hard to escape those opinions that formed fairly widely in the industry is, though.