A well rounded programmer will ask questions and then bother to figure out answers to those questions. So I think a lot of the shortcomings of a "PHP programme

A well rounded programmer will ask questions and then bother to figure out answers to those questions. So I think a lot of the shortcomings of a "PHP programmer" should really be assigned to just a "cut and paste" programmer. I can see your point about certain languages promoting bad practices though. It never occurred to me that people would not understand concepts outside of PHP because my progression was C++ -> Pascal (ha) -> Java -> PHP -> etc If I had started with PHP I would be f'ed. PHP is great for many things I want to do but I have met "PHP programmers" who are quite lazy and not knowledgeable about programming in general.