Why should PHP "force" anything? That's one of PHP's strengths: the ability to be everything from a simple dynamic webpage to a full blown app. That's like saying "I wish someone would make a hammer that only strikes nails, because I'm a poor craftsman and keep hitting my thumb."

Love it or hate it, PHP will be around long after elitist devs turn their guns on noSQL and server side JS.

Actually the ability to mix PHP and "HTML" is the only reason I still use PHP occasionally. Sometimes, I have a plain-text file, and would like to use variables or simple loops in it. The best way to do this is PHP!

For example, say I want to plot a couple of data columns with gnuplot (an open source plotting program) into several images. I can write a PHP script "myplot.plt.php" that generates a gnuplot script (untested):

    set terminal png enhanced
    <?php
    for ($i = 2; $i <= 4; $i++) {
        $outputfile = "plot$i.png"
        echo <<EOT
        set output "$outputfile"
        plot "data.txt" u 1:$i
    EOT;
    }
    ?>

and then invoke it from gnuplot with

    load "< php myplot.plt.php"

This is a stupid example, but it gets really powerful when you dynamically calculate labels, element positions, etc.. PHP may be a crappy language for web development, but it is a really nice macro language, and has really powerful string processing features, making it ideal for this kind of hack.

That's so funny. When I look at $'s in PHP, it feels so natural. Then when I see someone use $ in variable names in JS, it gets me agitated.

While not enforced at the language level, PSR-1 states that "Files SHOULD either declare symbols (classes, functions, constants, etc.) or cause side-effects (e.g. generate output, change .ini settings, etc.) but SHOULD NOT do both."

Basically it stipulates that you should keep classes outside of the main page loader to be compliant.