Completely getting your point that it could be annoying for some people out there. It never bothered me though and while this is not really a strong argument, i

Completely getting your point that it could be annoying for some people out there. It never bothered me though and while this is not really a strong argument, it's always one of the first things to come up when people talk about PHP's flaws. If it really bugs you it could easily be solved with a few helper/wrapper functions. (Besides that, regarding elegance of syntax, there's no doubt that most other languages used for web dev'ing are lightyears ahead of PHP.)