I'm not really sure why this comment is getting downvoted, but literally every single thing in that post still holds true.
The remaining things are:
• the endless whine about inconsistent underscores in function names and haystack/needle. These are a bad look, but aren't really an obstacle to using the language (PHP devs memorize the common functions, rely on IDE or docs for the rest, and move on).
• being offended about use of backslash as the namespace separator. It really doesn't matter at all.
• old constructs and edge cases that exist, but are not used in new code.
• general upset about dynamically-typed languages, and all the consequences and compromises that dynamic typing brings.
That post is just a rant. It presents insignificant/arbitrary choices as flaws (e.g. "clone is an operator?!" — so what?). Some complaints are totally ridiculous, e.g. exceptions thrown in destructors were fatal errors, and that was bad. When the restriction has been removed, the post has been updated to complain that this is bad too, because now you can throw literally everywhere! Apparently, no matter what PHP does, it's bad.
Nope (c) Me, after 5 years on trying to but still falling back to googling every 20 minutes despite years and years of using the language.
... And just writing code without looking into docs much after a week with ruby
Don't get me started on Ruby, though. Wading through a tower of classes to figure out where and how some method is defined, only to much later find out it was actually created by define_method or method_missing is absolute torture. And yeah, I know the REPL can provide this info to you. The point is: source code should be obvious in how it functions. Not obscure things through cleverness.
Just scrolling through at random:
> A function’s return value can’t be hinted.
But of course, this has been incorrect for years. The next was fixed in 5.3, the next two be fixed in 7.4, the next was fixed in 5.4, etc., etc. Which is fine; it's an old article, and one which was deeply influential on PHPs development, but it's completely false to suggest that "literally every single thing in that post still holds true". Many are outdated.
- A fair chunk of phpsadness is still unfixed - e.g. https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=49664 where recursing too much producing a segfault is Not A Bug.
- PHP's release machines were compromised. Let's not worry who downloaded it. http://news.php.net/php.internals/77695
- PHP 6. There's no hope of making PHP work in Unicode, ever. It's like Python 3, except half way through, they went 'let's not even bother'.
- The rebuttal elsewhere on this thread points to the very problem in the PHP community:
>> PHP’s one unique operator is @ (actually borrowed from DOS), which silences errors.
> Yup. I find it very useful on the unlink() function which will raise an error if the file you're trying to delete doesn't exist.
That just demonstrates that unlink is broken! PHP's error handling is some horrible collection of C, C++ and just spamming stderr.