> There’s no clear design philosophy. Early PHP was inspired by Perl; the huge stdlib with “out” params is from C; the OO parts are designed like C++ and Java
There's even complaints about PHP 5.2, but PHP 5.4 had just been released a month earlier:
> If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. [...] Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
> foo()[0] is a syntax error. (Fixed in PHP 5.4.)
> PHP errors and PHP exceptions are completely different beasts. They don’t seem to interact at all. (Fixed in PHP 7)
> There is no finally construct (Fixed in PHP 5.5)
> Methods cannot be named e.g. “list”, because list() is special syntax (Fixed in PHP 7)
I'm going to stop there. Not saying any of it wasn't valid criticism or that some of it doesn't apply to this day. Just that too many people, yourself included, are happy to throw a 6 year old blog post at a language that has continued to evolve since. It's also strange that you say it isn't criticized for a big and clumsy library, because in the link you provided about half of the page is complaints about the library.
