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PHP is a fine language. It started my career. That said, it has a lot of baggage that can let you shoot yourself in the foot. Modern PHP is pretty awesome though.

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Pretty sure we've seen people coding in essentially every other programming language also shoot themselves in the foot.

Every language has foot-guns of some sort. The difference is how easy it is to accidentally pull the trigger.

PHP makes it easy.

Back in the day people were all about languages like C that made it incredibly easy too.

We didn't have anything better unless you wanted to take a massive performance hit and/or lose a ton of flexibility and capability.

Yeah of course PHP isn't the only programming language you can write bugs in. I don't think you can make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot, but PHP gives you more opportunities than some other languages, especially with older PHP standard library functions.

One thing I particularly hate is when functions require calling another function afterwards to get any errors that happened, like `json_decode`. C has that problem too.

Problems don't make it a _bad_ programming language. All languages have problems. PHP just has more than some other languages.

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