Blaming the language for bad code is asinine. Blame bad (or inexperienced, or just plain lazy) programmers. I write PHP stuff. I also write Perl, C, C++, C#, Pascal, JS, and recently VHDL. I have written Java and Ruby code as well, but no longer do. Overall PHP is only as bad as the developer makes it. If I could change one thing about it, it would be getting the built in functions more consistent in return types and argument order for similar functions. I'm constantly referring to the documentation