While I agree with nearly every assertion you make, I'm still hazy on what 'good' is. Surely the fact that so many people find PHP the most productive language

While I agree with nearly every assertion you make, I'm still hazy on what 'good' is. Surely the fact that so many people find PHP the most productive language they could've worked with, and produce mountains and mountains of working code that is at least mostly reliable - don't those qualities alone make it in some sense good? Then again I think some pop music is good, so I'm starting from a point where I don't necessarily think being popular makes something mediocre. That said, I really hate being forced to write in PHP because of its complete inelegance, so much so that I have left all my legacy PHP in a burning garbage heap and ran screaming to Scala, where type safety is a given. But as I'm being forced to move back to PHP for a project because of a client's demands I'm trying to look at the silver lining of programming with it. Sometimes it takes some squinting but it is possible to appreciate what PHP has accomplished.