Fatal errors is fair enough; though I only ever experienced this with parse errors, PHP being stateless did make this less likely to be caught until well into r

Fatal errors is fair enough; though I only ever experienced this with parse errors, PHP being stateless did make this less likely to be caught until well into runtime, so it could be an issue. String encoding though is, again, something other languages had similar gotchas with. Remember we're comparing PHP to its popular alternatives at the time, not to our hypthetical ideal runtime. The bad defaults you and a sibling commenter are referring to (magic quotes) are, again, from 11 years ago. Sure, 15 years ago PHP had serious issues, but here we are today acting as if they didn't fix most of them over a decade ago.