I'm quite shocked that a common complaint of any language is function syntax. Maybe it's been awhile since I've used PHP, but is it really worse than any other

I'm quite shocked that a common complaint of any language is function syntax. Maybe it's been awhile since I've used PHP, but is it really worse than any other language? The problem with PHP is that, at least years ago, it had no equivalent of C's man pages. In C, you're constantly doing "man memchr" or what have you. Perl has "perldoc -f sort". 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.