You can be productive in any language, but PHP is a painful language for anyone who didn't grow up in PHP - or out of it.

Look at the fundamental concepts of software engineering - lists, associative dictionaries, objects, functions and their parameters, namespaces, modules.

Each one of these is done in PHP in idiosyncratic and unnecessarily complex ways. The language grammar was clearly never planned, and the keywords are used haphazardly and in ways that interact badly.

And the C Standard library keeps peeking out from underneath!