[kiwidrew]

I used to look down on PHP, but after being forced to use it for a while I begrudgingly came to admire it for all the reasons that you've pointed out. And I started using PHP by choice, generally for writing small scripts (no frameworks or libraries) that I could "deploy" simply by copying the .php file into /var/www. It's a very productive language when used as intended.

PHP scripts on shared webhosting was the original "serverless" and you didn't have to be too careful about object lifetimes and leaking database connections because as soon as the request was finished the entire process was nuked from orbit.

But "modern PHP" is the complete antithesis of everything that I grew to admire about PHP because it's just another Java or C# with awful syntax and weird equality rules and gigantic frameworks with thousands of classes and interfaces.

I would very much like to see a version of PHP that dropped all the nasty namespace and object-oriented misfeatures and just focused on cleaning up the language semantics and enhancing the built-in framework features...