[aidos]

I spent a couple of years with php recently. I was using Codeigniter as a framework. Php frameworks now compete with the rest and the language is as complete as most others. Setup couldn't be much easier and it's probably the most ubiquitous web language.

It does, however, have some bad behaviours of out the box that promote bad app development. I was startled at the default error handling when I had to start using it again recently. It was a fight to get it to display errors - and stop executing - whenever something was wrong in the code. This is madness. If your code is broken, it should notify you. I tried doing the same thing to existing well known php apps. They wouldn't even load. That, for me, is the core issue. You have an ecosystem devoloped by people who seemingly don't even care if there are bugs in their code.

[jtreminio]

Your framework may have been catching exceptions and continuing execution.

If you want all errors displayed, you should tell PHP about it. In fact, it is recommended you display everything possible and code to strict standard while in dev. Doesn't sound like you were doing that.

[kayoone]

Hm, might be your framework of choice then ? Symfony2 for example shows complete Stack Traces of Exceptions and has a very detailed debug panel