I thought Go was a hip to hate language also. Seems to get a bunch of grief about "missing" things. I quite like it but haven't used much beyond toy projects.
Well, the difference is that the hate is coming from different directions. PHP is hated by nearly everyone except pure pragmatist. Go is hated by somewhat experienced programmers which find the absence of certain features inconvenient.
That said, I like them both somehow. PHP was the first programming language I learned beyond simple hello-world like programs (today, I use it mostly for prototypes only) and Go is my language of choice for performance-intensive tools.
In the end, I have not met any language yet, you can not hate. Smalltalk is beautiful, but can't do arithmetics properly (e.g., `1 + 2 * 3` == 9). Lisp lets you write correct programs, but breaks your parenthesis key. C++ can be fast, but actually doing it is hard and have you ever solved one of those template-error riddles?
> Smalltalk is beautiful, but can't do arithmetics properly (e.g., `1 + 2 * 3` == 9). Lisp lets you write correct programs, but breaks your parenthesis key
Are these actually problems? Just things you have to know, and get used to.
So what are problems then? I mean, we live in a world where we have NP-Hard problems every day, but once you get used to being satisfied with a 95% correct solution it is no problem living in this world.
So yes, you can get used to such things and in the case of Smalltalk, it would actually harm the beauty of the language to evaluate that expression differently. Nevertheless, you could also argue that a language which doesn't respect one of the early rules every human learns in school isn't best for being used by humans ;-)
So let's just say it is not binary (just 'yes' and 'no') and PHP is just a language which happens to bring a few more unnecessary challenges for the developer (like the inconsistent function names).
