My point is that it's not an undeserved reputation, there were many real problems. That's what was being challenged. And the idea that it was reasonable to shi

My point is that it's not an undeserved reputation, there were many real problems. That's what was being challenged. And the idea that it was reasonable to ship paper thin wrappers around a C API in a high level scripting language is one of the many problems that used to plague PHP. You could even get it to segfault with certain APIs because they would basically just call C completely unchecked. You also have functions having "out parameters" because the underlying C function does, even though PHP has multiple ways to return multiple values. I could also point out how basically every PHP subsystem had its own set of functions for error handling instead of having any kind of unified error system. MySQL itself having made very questionable choices around the same era (and PHP and MySQL walking hand in hand) definitely doesn't help either, I grant you that.