[tomxor]

I've ended up treating PHP like shell scripting, with that mind set it becomes much more bearable for writing new code in... much like bash, you don't dare write anything too complex, yet can appreciate it for being a well positioned language for the specific type of task (and I say that having written lots of quite long but well composed bash scripts).

Unfortunately PHP is more capable as a language than shells while still having all those poorly thought out parts that will make you hate it if you try to exploit it to it's full capability.

Of course this mind set doesn't help much for existing massive code bases where all of the application logic is written in PHP.