Think of all the cool stuff they could have been inventing had they not needed to look up the name of strfind(?), and whether it takes the needle or the haystack first.
So what. Tell me you never use the man pages for the standard C library.
There's a whole generation of programmers out there that couldn't hack their way out of a wet paper back without the help of an IDE telling them what function parameters go where.
And in C I also still can't remember if the fwrite call takes (buffer, sizeof(element), nelements, fp) or (buffer, nelements, sizeof(element), fp).
This is all about religion, the PHP church has a large number of followers and it's 'bible' contains some arguably wrong pages, so those in other churches will go out of their way to shake their heads at all the fools in the PHP church when it's clear to everyone else that their religion is broken.
Meanwhile the PHP guys will simply get the job done and take home the loot.
I can program in lots of languages but for quick & dirty stuff (and don't tell me everything you write is of world class importance) it is very well suited, if you're disciplined you can take it to considerable heights before you run out of steam.
I have to use the man pages for most languages when I'm learning them. PHP is fairly unique among languages I've worked with (and that doesn't include C) in that I have to keep using the man pages even after I've become fairly fluent with it.
In Python, by contrast, that fwrite call is just:
fp.write(text)
In some ways, the religion metaphor is pretty apt, since the strongest critics of a religion are usually those raised in the religion who consciously reject it once they realize what else is out there. I learned web programming with PHP, and I've done several fairly large projects with it (the largest had ~100k registered users and ~250k hits/day at its peak). I ended up hating it enough that when it came time to look for full-time positions, I explicitly said "no PHP" and disqualified any jobs that used it.
(And actually...of late, everything I write is of world class importance, but that's an artifact of my current project and the fact that it's sorta taken over my life. I used to write quick & dirty stuff much more often, and I usually used Django for it.)
I'd argue that being in a market that people wanted made you money, not PHP. I dunno what the timescale of your successes was - I think PHP actually was the best option for webapps between about 1998 and 2004 - but there are better technologies available now.
Java and C++ made me money, PHP made me bupkis. Python at least is fun.
This is all about religion, the PHP church has a large number of followers and it's 'bible' contains some arguably wrong pages, so those in other churches will go out of their way to shake their heads at all the fools in the PHP church when it's clear to everyone else that their religion is broken.
This "we get it done, everyone else doesn't, ergo X is better despite its flaws" logical faux pax drives me up the bloody wall.
We all know that brand 'x' is 'the best' possible tool available.
So why doesn't everybody use brand 'x' ?
Well, because some people have gotten used to brand 'y' and it is good enough for them.
What's better doesn't enter in to it. There is a minimum level of performance required for the job and both tools meet those requirements, so both are valid tools to solve the problem with.
Which one is the 'better' one is a matter of perspective, and in that sense there are as many truths as there are observers.
