Sorry. I got bitter there at the end, it was uncalled for. I spent 3+ years as a PHP programmer, there's
certainly nothing wrong with being a PHP programmer, but it's hard to argue that in 2013 it is still a good and productive platform to learn. It pains me to see newcomers starting out by learning PHP, they are essentially shooting themselves in the foot for at least a year of their life (if they are going to be a professional web dev). I was pretty productive at PHP, but only because I cut my teeth for years writing shitty cgi-style PHP scripts, learning the abortion they call their stdlib, then using PHP's OOP crap and finally using frameworks like CI. Imagine if I had spent that time writing ruby. By the time you get the whole way through, you realize that your "high-level language"
should do work for you, not the other way around. I think what it comes down to is that PHP does not mandate good design patterns because it cannot even decide on one itself. Once I understood this, the language was forever tainted.
I think the only reason PHP is still relevant is because it's so damn accessible (kinda like w3schools), every shared hosting provider under the sun gives you apache+php, and when you're starting learning web programming shared providing is the way to go.
Why do you say php and Javascript suffer from the same ailments? They suffer from a few of the same ailments, like a crappy/confusing stdlib (although you don't see mysql_real_escape_string in javascript's API) and funky invisible type coercions. Lack of true OOP in javascript, though confusing to beginners, is a design feature as far as I'm concerned, prototyping gives you the tools to implement OOP however you like. But javascript has had a known design pattern from the beginning, which is very powerful and useful once you learn it. I strongly doubt a (another?) phplint at this point would change anything.
As for the "anecdotally" slide, I read the last statement as a conclusion of the previous stats, which didn't make any sense to me. Either I am completely misreading it or you are taking the phrase "anecdotally" far too literally.