PHP is awful regardless of who uses it. The language was created as a Perl for Dummies and never moved beyond its roots until version 5 (which retains backward compatibility with all the madness). Any "extensions" - such as the ability to access an RDBMS server - had to be compiled in to the interpreter since the language initially didn't have the various pieces necessary to write such connecting code in actual PHP. And these extensions simply dumped a bunch of crap into the global namespace. So, if you compiled in support for MySQL, you ended up with a bunch of "mysql_whatever" functions to call. Better yet, there was little to no coordination between projects so mysql_whatever functions may or may not have analogous pgsql_whatever functions should you want to change to another RDBMS.
While a lot of that has been fixed there are simply a lot of historical problems like that. I don't see those sorts of issues in C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, or most other modern languages. No, PHP is a breed apart.
Other than that I agree with most of what you say. I don't find C++ to be terrible but I haven't touched it in 15 years, either.