I have a pretty broad experience with a lot of languages, and while I wouldn't say I hate any of them to the point of wanting to murder their creators with my bare hands in a dark alley behind OSCON, I'd say that there are languages (like PHP) that have annoyed me to the point of never wanting to use them unless I absolutely have to on threat of death or incapacitation. I can get the same thing done in Rails with more sanity and less or equal amounts of code and far less frustration. Or I'd much prefer to never, ever use Java again beyond certain very specific tasks; that's largely because I can use a large number of languages for the same task these days. If I need performance, there's always C or C# is cross platform, as is Scheme, Objective-C, etc.; if I need to work with some Java library, there are languages like Scala and JRuby that are much more pleasant.

So, for me at least, my "hatred" of languages comes from finding better alternatives that "knock the shine off" the previously used language, if you will. Progress showing the failings of the past perhaps?

There are things I dislike about PHP as such; it picked up Perl's sigils, but inconsistently; is $x a scalar, a list, or or a dictionary? Its support for first class functions just isn't there (in 5 anyway), and using "map' is a pain. None of these are anything like showstoppers.

What sets my teeth on edge is some code I have inherited, which takes all the possibilities available to the new & undisciplined programmer, and runs with them. 2000-line scripts with mixed HTML and code, global variables used indiscriminately, dead code here and there. None of this is PHP's fault, but reflexively and unfairly I associate it with PHP as a language. I suspect that this is where most of the dislike of PHP comes from.

Actually, since 5.3 PHP has had anonymous functions. The implementation is a bit of a kludge, but they're there.

It's probably because most people have never made something elegant with PHP. The language is always a means to an end. It, in and of itself, will not make you a better developer. It can do a lot of work for you (frameworks) and make esoteric design patterns easier, but it always comes down to your ability to write structured, maintainable code. PHP makes it easier to hack together scripts. A majority of developers never take the next step in their life and learn the ways to properly structure a website. Chances are, if they do, it's because they've joined another language with the promise of an easier world (Rails, Python) and fail to realize you can do the exact same things in any other language - although it might required a little more understanding of its nuances (PHP).