PHP fell foul of adopting other languages' features to try and make itself more popular though (OOP, typing, err... I don't know PHP anymore), Go is actively resistant to it. Or, resistant as in, "sell it to us" where it's a really hard sell to add something to the language that can already be done in a different way. The error handling debate from a few years ago was great, a few really well thought-out proposals were made but in the end, people were like "...this is not an improvement over how we do it right now".
You don't have to use all these new fancy PHP features as long as you don't use any third party libraries. I still write PHP just like I did in 2002 and it works.
It's not as pedantic as Python which makes it pretty useful for small data manipulation tasks which I have to do every now and then.
