And how did it manage that? Python forced people to deal with encodings properly and the result was a lot of pain. You're claiming PHP somehow invisibly fixed the numerous problems of the language without anybody noticing? That "fractal of bad design" blog post, everything described in it has been fixed?
If so I want to learn how they did it. That's some heavy duty language evolution work.
This is why so many basic php web hosts continue to offer older php versions because the old code will not work and why paid projects like cloudlinux hardened php still exists. Just in the last 2 years they finally ended security support for php4 on the hardened php project.
So to explain how it worked, it wasn’t as sudden as python, but the problem areas have been depreciated and removed as php has evolved.
Everything? No.
Much of it? Absolutely (and the more widely a particular point is agreed upon, the more likely it's fixed). The article is eleven years old.
If that was a metric for language quality, then Javascript would be undeniably the most perfect language ever designed by any intelligent species in the universe, judging by the number of frameworks.
> to an almost decent language
And now I would like to hear a good reason why I should use an "almost decent language", when I can use a decent one instead.
> It can be used properly if you know what you are doing
It doesn't matter what I do, the language still insists of having multiple modes of error handling, a massive amount of builtins all of which sit in my global namespace, it's configuration is still seperated between compiler flags, a system wide ini, and local config. The base deployment mode is still "dump files into folder and let CGI do the rest".
What i am saying is that the offering of tools has matured in php - instead of a basic template engine like smarty you now have “advanced” templating engines, packages and so on. Python has less packages but that can also he because python packages work better and there is no need for an overwhelming number of packages.
Regarding error handling that’s precisely one of the many issues with php. There are so many ways of doing the same thing that it becomes exhausting. And what many php devs do is they work around these issues either by endless hair splitting debates or a dubious amount of made up design patterns.
You shouldn't use php, i am totally against it. I think it’s as bad as it can affect your mental health. Just saying that by comparison to it’s previous versions it has come a long way.
However it does handle character encoding quite well and you can scale as much as you want to literally. Probably because thats too complex for the average php developer and it was left to core language developers which are pretty competent and experienced.