Personally I call PHP crappy because it could easily have been much better at its main goal without sacrificing anything from its other goals, but for some reason it wasn't, and now we have to live with the stupid early decisions for compatibility reasons (eg there's no good reason for the mess of strFunc, str_func, string_func, funcstr, needle/haystack, haystack/needle, etc. When the main goal is being super-productive early on, being able to use the most basic functions without constantly looking up their order of parameters would be a great help)