The part you didn't include in your quoted reply was the single opinion i refered to (including implicit opinion/s).
I should have wrote it a bit different = "opinion" (singular).

Literally the anser to your question: No. I didn't, i didn't do that too, but i was coding in php pretty well on a daily basis, didn't use much of the php5 OOP functionality, though. Php wasn't quite the language to solve most problems, but quick and straightforward unlike perl, which requires more geekyness and was working out-of-the-box on most distributions other than windoze, escpecially because windows was quite the exception in the serverside environment(s) i was working at.
I only used compiler  langs when i really needed a native binary for a specific platform, which mostly was a desire for windoze targets. Edited Java on *nix machines, didn't like it at all, don't ask me why.