Some valid criticisms, but 9 years old and out of date.<p>I think the mistake is thinking of PHP as “designed” as a language, rather than built to solve some real problems. More important is how well PHP <i>works</i> rather than how far away it falls from an imagined better-designed language.<p>As Stroustrup quipped, there are two kinds of languages: Those everyone hates, and those no one uses.
<a href="https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture" rel="nofollow">https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture</a><p>^^ Someone recently shared this article with me. Really made me think about my interaction with programmers using other languages.
The PHP of today is now a fine house built on a terrible foundation. The warts from the original language are still there, but inexplicably they have decided to just soldier on and build a good language on top of them.<p>For instance they've built a perfectly good object system with many advanced features; yet arrays, strings, etc aren't objects so you can't even call methods on them, they can only be manipulated by a dated, procedural API.