I don't want to get into an "all languages are the same / all languages have quirks" kind of thing, but the idea that PHP is weird, different, and in a sense in

I don't want to get into an "all languages are the same / all languages have quirks" kind of thing, but the idea that PHP is weird, different, and in a sense inscrutable, and this has an impact on its use and performance, just doesn't bear out. Yes, it has quirks -- so does C, so does C#, so does JS, so does lua, so does tcl, so does every assembly language I've ever worked with. So what? Are those preventing people from writing good code? Are those preventing people from shipping? Could it be improved? Has it already been improved? No, no, yes, and yes. The biggest reason PHP's gotten so much scrutiny, to where people write these kinds of posts, is its ubiquity. When JS moved from being that simple, silly language built into the browser into a widely used one, we started seeing slide deck gags about the inscrutability of its comparison operators, yet JS seldom attracts this level of derision.