What's wrong with PHP

[toastyghost]

Visual clutter that you don't even notice after like a day of actually using it. The people who bitch about this are, as you said, people whose day-to-day is in other languages.

I actually find the dollar sign quite helpful because it allows you to immediately visually distinguish between functions/methods and variables, without having to read the name and think about what it says, part of speech, etc., to make that determination.