@a_lex_ander @torb @Crell @sushee What I personally find lesser about PHP is the design of the language. The syntax. How the language looks like.
Most of the idiosyncracies from the 1990's are thankfully gone, but for historical reasons \ was chosen as a namespace separator, $ is everywhere, idiomatic PHP has a mix of snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase, reserved functions are prefixed with __ (__construct, __serialize), etc.
I understand that my taste is subjective, but these are the parts of PHP I just can't ignore. However, while I did mind writing PHP 20+ years ago – I wouldn't mind writing PHP today. Some of its newer features, like the pipe operator and callables in constant expressions, are quite awesome!