The thing I disliked most about PHP is all the extra boilerplate and key strokes. In most languages, foo.bar requires 7 keystrokes. In PHP it would be $foo->bar

The thing I disliked most about PHP is all the extra boilerplate and key strokes. In most languages, foo.bar requires 7 keystrokes. In PHP it would be $foo->bar, or 11 keystrokes. Expressing the same idea in PHP vs Ruby or Python always requires more typing.