With a good framework and sensible abstractions, and using an IDE takes away most of the frustration you guys mention. I feel like most of these arguments are, "I saw bad code and don't want to develop solutions so it's time to argue that the language is horrible." I mostly agree with ChronoFish And More's simple assertion, the language is extremely fast to develop with and if you have any sort of CS training and discipline with normal coding standards, PHP apps can end up having very elegant and sensible solutions for projects. Getting confused from explode() when you have an IDE popup to show you which variable goes where is extremely nitpicky in my opinion. If it really gets to you, you can always find an object oriented library of the languages constructs so that you can do a less confusing $array.explode('/') or something similar. I agree that there are a lot of things that should simply be deprecated as the language moves forward, as sometimes having 10 different ways to solve a problem results in baddies coming in and making hard to work with apps.. but at times like that I feel it's times like that to show that there are more efficient and cleaner ways to do things and build up the programming community :P.