My first language was Pascal. The concept of combining strings and integers in PHP without any conversion was scary and magical to me at first, but the damn thing worked, as long as you were careful. I still get mad at people who complain about type coercion because they expect their programming language of choice to read their minds and wipe their ass.

And Dijkstra was kidding. As is Rasmus when he says he'll restart Apache every 10 requests. Hyperbole. Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click. It has to.