That's also a feature - by design it has to be friendly to new users, and not an arcane art only accessible to the Chosen One, as much as those Chosen Ones would like to be the only programmers.
A lot of the mockery PHP got was not because it attracted amateur developers, it was because the language itself was amateurishly implemented and because of the resulting mess when that leaked into how it behaved. Things like function names in the standard library optimized for a strlen based hash, a hand rolled parser that made it impossible to even guess in which contexts what features would work, proactive conversion of strings into numbers "0hello" == "0world", ... . There where entire communities dedicated not to mock the people working with PHP but the language itself.
