I think you're confusing php (the language) with bad programming practices (the developers). They aren't the same.
A true enough statement, except what i am referring to is that PHP (the language) lends itself to bad practice and has extremely bad security issues (example: your config info is usually in world readable files so *anyone* can get your database connection info and have there way with your data) and has general unnecessary administration concerns (to add support for the simplest thing can break apache or PHP for the entire server, yeah yeah PECL, PEAR, etc whatever, they're crap).
Or why not just
touch ~/php.ini
and all your "secure" php.ini settings are turned right off (yeah yeah until you do Zend Optimizer's php.ini, but again more bloat for your buck)