[bastawhiz]

Besides the common gripes, the thing that ruined PHP for me was learning that empty("0") is true. I learned this the hard way when this edge case caused an incident and I spent half a week rewriting code to be...not that.

PHP has some great properties, and if you're tolerant of its sharp edges, great. But up until recently (and perhaps still?) it's got many of its safeties turned off by default. When I left PHP, (insecure) mysql bindings still came included pretty much universally, but often not PDO. They have every amazing helper function under the sun at your fingertips (urlencode and htmlentities!) but also some tremendously dangerous ones (backticks! variable variables!).

What's most striking to me is that Slack is 100% off of PHP now (onto Hack). There's something telling when neither the syntax nor the runtime nor the standard library are sufficient for the biggest users of a language. With recent versions of the core runtime finally getting fast, I wonder if they'll rip off the bandaid and break backwards compatibility to dull some of the larger sharp edges.