It has not improved much. It has added some superficial things. But I am afraid that the worst part of the language is still very much alive. >No compilation,

It has not improved much. It has added some superficial things. But I am afraid that the worst part of the language is still very much alive. >No compilation, no deployment, not even any need to have two files open at once; just stick a couple of lines of PHP into an HTML file, hit reload, and you're there. >And it is really good at providing server-side programming to a web site with the utter minimum of work This is exactly the problem with the language. It lets you cuts corners when those corners are there for a reason. For example, look at the ease of deployment that you have mentioned. For a novice, this will be appealing. But for someone with experience with web applications, it might look appalling that you can map urls directly to execute arbitrary files in a directory. This theme is found throughout the language. In an attempt to make work easier for novices and to make it easy to work with data send from html forms, the language has been packed with so much weird behaviors that you need to learn before you can build stuff in php with any sort of confidence. And that is just the tip of the iceberg....