> "web developers" with no formal programming education I know developers who couldn't afford a "formal programming education" or couldn't/didn't go for variou

> "web developers" with no formal programming education I know developers who couldn't afford a "formal programming education" or couldn't/didn't go for various reasons, and they'd blow most "formally educated" developers out of the water. I think the word "formal" is surplus here. > stumbling across PHP and going "aha this can generate my html etc" and then proceeding to make a pile of mistakes. This holds true for anything in life, really. Anyone who uses a tool which they don't understand will sooner or later make a mistake with that tool, and keep making mistakes. WARNING: The next might be anecdotal, so YMMV. I used to write a lot of code in PHP (and I am grateful, because it is partially responsible for introducing me to the world of programming), but I slowly moved away from as time passed. The main problems with PHP (apart from some interpreter issues/design decisions which I won't cover, because there's an abundant amount of that online already) are the fact that: 1) it probably has the lowest entry barrier, with near-instant gratification and 2) there is an insane amount of online tutorials, blog posts, courses and even "books" created by people who *think* they understand programming (and PHP), but actually don't. Web development is not any more trivial than system development, or any less complicated. This probably goes for any type of development. To be proficient in either, you need need to cover a very wide range of domains, but PHP resources makes you feel like web development is trivial and easy. Anyone who assumes web development is trivial doesn't really know shit about web development (excuse the language). tl;dr: I mostly agree with you that PHP's design decisions aren't the only problem bad PHP code exists, and that people who use PHP are largely to be blamed for their own mistakes.