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I am a PHP developer since over a decade now who has considered jumping ship several times now. I am glad I didn't. To clarify upfront, I am not against learning other languages, quite the contrary actually. But I am glad I didn't abandon PHP when most of the "bad things" said about PHP were true.

Yes, PHP has flaws, maybe has more in its share than other programming languages. I wish PHP's function naming conventions were consistent (also its parameter conventions). I wish it was stricter with arrays. I wish it was stricter with comparisons. And a lot more. I won't undermine efforts required for someone to deal with these flaws but I dealt with them.

I did that because I found a community and saw that a community was much more important than a language's (or framework's) technical features. My experience being involved in PHP community, specifically Drupal, has been - there is no other word for it - awesome. Actually, Drupal (code) was one of the reasons I didn't leave the PHP ecosystem but that is another story.

I have written about my experience with Drupal and other technologies elsewhere (my blog) but it comes down to this:

• Like you said, you can write readable, testable, and fast code (in other words good code) with PHP.
• Design patterns apply to any language. You have to know enough about the language to decide how to implement a pattern there.
• Community is much more important than a language's features. By all means, use the best tool for the job (and that may not be PHP) but always look for a community behind the technology.