Hector Martin

Culture matters. The problem is that a newbie trying to learn PHP and googling for answers is going to come across much lower quality code than a newbie learning something like Python. Even with the recent core PHP fixes, this is a problem the PHP community may never solve.

(And the docs are evidence of the problem being systemic and severe; if the docs are this bad, imagine how much worse all the random blogs are!)

You'll not get an argument from me here. I saw people writing tutorials that were susceptible to SQLi and using a deprecated interface literally days before said interface was removed when PHP 7 was released. I've seen too many of those blogs

PHP is often a victim of its own success. It flatters you. It's so easy that you make awful mistakes, not knowing what you were doing. I know; I did them. But I'd have been dangerous in any language, to be fair. I learned, and now I teach it

The problem is the original PHP design *was* comically bad and encouraged comically bad practices. A lot of that baggage still haunts it, but the worse part is that without the *designers* of the language having good practices, you build a community that doesn't either.

Like Javascript?

In different ways, yes. It's not hard to argue that PHP is worse, though.

Nope. Still not the language itself.