I agree. It isn't the language which makes the project good. A bad programmer will write bad code no matter what language they use, and a good programmer should be able to write good code in any language, even PHP.
Perhaps once a language becomes mainstream, and is adopted by many people, not just the early hacker adopters, the perception of the language as clean and elegant goes down. This isn't necessarily because the language has changed, but because the average person using it has become less skilled. Languages that are comparatively new and shiny are mostly used by the much more talented early adopters, and thus seem to be more professional and clean. (This is just speculation, so feel free to disagree if your personal experience doesn't reflect this.)
Of course some languages make it easy for inexperienced programmers to write bad code, but this doesn't mean that good code can't be written in that language.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you are a decent programmer you should be able to write clean, reusable, DRY, efficient code in just about any language.
So as far as your argument goes I agree. The important thing is the team doing the programming, not the language they are programming in. If they are a decent team they will be able to do good development in PHP, or any other language.
Perhaps once a language becomes mainstream, and is adopted by many people, not just the early hacker adopters, the perception of the language as clean and elegant goes down. This isn't necessarily because the language has changed, but because the average person using it has become less skilled. Languages that are comparatively new and shiny are mostly used by the much more talented early adopters, and thus seem to be more professional and clean. (This is just speculation, so feel free to disagree if your personal experience doesn't reflect this.)
Of course some languages make it easy for inexperienced programmers to write bad code, but this doesn't mean that good code can't be written in that language.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you are a decent programmer you should be able to write clean, reusable, DRY, efficient code in just about any language.
So as far as your argument goes I agree. The important thing is the team doing the programming, not the language they are programming in. If they are a decent team they will be able to do good development in PHP, or any other language.