[wooby]

If there's anything good about PHP that I can tell, its that development is heavily community driven and has been since the early days. However, I think PHP got so popular, and so quickly, that in many cases the community's desire for features has led to an inconsistent, and in your view, 'broken' system. The need for backwards compatibility from almost the very beginning has taken its toll, I think. Is it really 'broken' though? Of course, similar concepts have been implemented in other languages much more elegantly. But PHP is not about elegance - it's about backwards compatibility, and responding to community feature requests.

I'm not a part of the community, and I'm no longer a PHP developer (if I can help it) but I can't think of any other reason the global functions would still have inconsistent argument orders almost 14 years on. So, if the 'correctness' of their implementation bothers you, do what I did: move on. Because it will never get any better.

Incidentally, I wrote an anti-PHP rant last year called "Why PHP Won" that made its rounds here. It's pretty easy to get fed up with PHP, especially when you know there's better stuff out there. Once you're at that point though, you're done. It's anything-else time.