Everyone always makes this argument, and yes you can write bad code in any language. That's a truism that contributes nothing to the discussion.

Now which languages make it easier to write more good code? Everyone talks about the lack of good PHP code and the response is "well there's plenty of bad python code out there!". What we will never see are any examples of PHP code held up as being great a few years from now.

Yes, every few years a set of tools get trolled badly. The same tools that were considered sub par by professionals at the time.