Just read an enjoyable rant entitled PHP: a fractal of bad design by a nerd who calls himself Eevee.

A good effort!

I also found a link to PHP Sadness there, and a bunch of other links to sites that complain about PHP.

This kind of criticism is correct, and valid, but it’s also pretty common, and low-hanging fruit.  I mean, come on.  We all know this stuff, right?  We just haven’t bothered to catalogue all the problems.

The other problem with this criticism is … reality.   PHP has had these problems since forever, and if they were really so significant, then no one would use it at all.  So there is something of value in PHP, and some part of it’s design is helping people get things done.

Yes, there are a million pitfalls.  Yes, there is a lack of consistency across a broad swath of the PHP built-in libraries. But apparently the people using PHP don’t suffer all that much for it.  Lots of people use PHP to build simple systems quickly, without getting all tangled up about whether to check exceptions or not, or whether “1” is the same as 1.

If you want a beautifully designed and consistent programming language environment, PHP is not it.  Ok, then.  Move along. No one is forcing you to use PHP.