It really pains me that there are so many utter misunderstandings about modern PHP from people that used it years ago and have no clue about the current landscape, even in this thread.
Yes, the PHP core api is still a bit messy due to backward compatibility, but everything else it pretty awesome really. Please take a closer look if you haven't touched PHP in years, before you talk it down.
Oh, did you mean PHP the language? The webserver? The FastCGI server? The runtime?
PHP starts as a fucking mess and gets worse. Maybe once the developers figure out what it is I'll take a look but yeah it's pretty much the developers taking standard features from other languages and fucking them up just like they did yesteryear.
Closures with a use block... even in C you don't have to do that... it's a joke and a mess... How is it that a 44 year old language has better features and less cruft than one 15 years old?
Yes, the PHP core api is still a bit messy due to backward compatibility, but everything else it pretty awesome really. Please take a closer look if you haven't touched PHP in years, before you talk it down.