Just like I tell people that buy cordless drills at Harbor Freight, "sometimes it IS the tool". Does that mean you can't build fast, meaningful, cool things with it? Of course you can. But, the deeper you get, the more problems you'll have to solve with weird esoteric knowledge. I'll agree with all of your points on horribly inconsistent and broken language features.
I get that people that have grown up with the language, or folks who have used it full time for years, don't see these blemishes as that big of a deal. But to newcomers, or folks from other languages, it's an affront. I hate to pile on an old, worn out issue but, as a language designer/implementer, the moment you start working on `mysql_real_escape_string()`, a huge warning bell should have gone off! I'm fine if people want to question my competence in writing code. It happens all the time on HN. I've been at it for 20 years... so some rando telling me that I don't know what I'm doing is pretty common. What we find in PHP though is quite a bit of tribal/tacit knowledge. And it's wrong to blame the user.
I get that people that have grown up with the language, or folks who have used it full time for years, don't see these blemishes as that big of a deal. But to newcomers, or folks from other languages, it's an affront. I hate to pile on an old, worn out issue but, as a language designer/implementer, the moment you start working on `mysql_real_escape_string()`, a huge warning bell should have gone off! I'm fine if people want to question my competence in writing code. It happens all the time on HN. I've been at it for 20 years... so some rando telling me that I don't know what I'm doing is pretty common. What we find in PHP though is quite a bit of tribal/tacit knowledge. And it's wrong to blame the user.