They say eventually you learn to love your captor.
Frameworks can help a lot, but what PHP really needs is an equivalent to CoffeeScript that fixes all of these glaring issues with PHP.
Although there's issues with the PHP language implementation, the biggest problems are the enormous number of functions with quirky argument ordering that need to be understood by a developer before they're operating at full efficiency.
It's all fun and games until you want to find a string in an array.
The entirety of the PHP API should be bundled up in a burlap bag, beaten savagely with a baseball bat, then thrown in a shallow grave to be set on fire before being buried. The "Goodfellas" treatment is way too kind in this case.
Frameworks can help a lot, but what PHP really needs is an equivalent to CoffeeScript that fixes all of these glaring issues with PHP.
Although there's issues with the PHP language implementation, the biggest problems are the enormous number of functions with quirky argument ordering that need to be understood by a developer before they're operating at full efficiency.