PHP - where's the code?

I had an amusing exchange with another programmer recently, he is looking into Drupal at the same time I was looking at Joomla! It wasnt a religious flame war, more a mutual moan.
"Dont know quite what to make of PHP" I said. "Yeah" he said. "Its great of course, but its not really like a programming language"
"Cant find structure" I said. "Must be there but dont see it yet"
"And where's the code?" he said.

And so it goes on. I dont know why I have such a problem, I even get Rails to some extent, and PHP is very reminicent of ASP and JSP -- I suppose its so long since a single line of script to run a GIF of a little man running around a box was a big deal that very short snippet of mark-up no longer does it for me as a persuasive argument. Still, lots of big site run PHP so I'm going to stick with it a while longer in search of enlightenment