[takeda]

When I used the language (around PHP 5) in the past it felt very inconsistent, and many functions were nearly 1:1 PHP interfaces to C functions. The type coercion also was bad, or the stupid idea of having form variables appear as variables in the language (I believe the defaults were changed to disable it in 5).

Learning the history of the language (and that initially PHP was not supposed to even be a language) explains why things were the way they were.

Anyway the language worked, it wasn't specifically bad, and if you didn't use other languages (excluding JS which has similar issues) you might not even see any problems with it.

Anyway, later they started fixing many of these issues and looks like the language is becoming more consistent (note I don't know if this is entirely true, since I haven't have chance of using newer versions, but that's how it feels from outside.)