PHP has always had the option to write good code. It's Turing-complete, you could just write a Haskell interpreter for it if you wanted. The problem has always been that PHP's bad programmers, by and large, are the ones evangelizing the language and writing the tutorials, so anyone trying to "learn programming" via PHP gets heavily exposed to things-only-bad-programmers-do, and never really sees much good code to know that there's another way.
I'm trying to do my part. I'm a mod of /r/php and trim out the crap and promote the good stuff.
Anytime someone new to PHP or not at a higher level asks a question, I point them to proper resources.
I'm in ##php and #phpmentoring on Freenode helping out with questions.
I write articles that are, in my humble opinion, not bad and have received many compliments from people who learned from my writings.
I'm doing my part, and so are many other PHP-centric developers, and it's annoying as hell to have us lumped in with code that's several years old, or sweatshop programmers that know nothing more than the very basics.
