[vegai_]

This. PHP is PHP just like Javascript is Javascript. Their growth process was a bunch of people needing things and just implementing them one by one without a grand design. It kinda works, but it'll never be Good in a theoretical sense.

Disturbingly for us language geeks, it doesn't seem to matter at all that they're not very good.

[astrange]

PHP has value types - the one "every data structure at once" type gets deep copied when you pass it to another function. That's enough to make it a good programming language, whereas Python is unnecessarily 90s class-based OOP with reference types.

[vegai_]

I don't quite understand what you mean here. Do you have an example?

[astrange]

If you have a dictionary and pass it around to someone else's code and it gets changed, those changes affect your code too instead of copying it, which is annoying and less safe.