> tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language [...] and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want i

> tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language [...] and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like Agree, and I'd like to add the original purpose of PHP, and what made it popular in the first place was that it can be used as embedded PHP within SGML-ish processing instruction ie <!php ...>. Only that PHP made such a lousy hack job of it being not HTML-aware and not doing context-dependent escaping, that it would become the primary script injection/XSS attack vector on the web. PHP's forte IMHO is its community and the large installed base of apps (there doesn't exist anything like Magento with its first-party plugins by DHL, UPS, payment providers, etc on Node.js for example). Why PHP wants to become more like Java or JavaScript is a mystery for me, when there's a hell of a cleanup job to be done beforehand, such as fixing <?php ...>.