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There are things I dislike about PHP as such; it picked up Perl's sigils, but inconsistently; is $x a scalar, a list, or or a dictionary? Its support for first class functions just isn't there (in 5 anyway), and using "map' is a pain. None of these are anything like showstoppers.

What sets my teeth on edge is some code I have inherited, which takes all the possibilities available to the new & undisciplined programmer, and runs with them. 2000-line scripts with mixed HTML and code, global variables used indiscriminately, dead code here and there. None of this is PHP's fault, but reflexively and unfairly I associate it with PHP as a language. I suspect that this is where most of the dislike of PHP comes from.



Actually, since 5.3 PHP has had anonymous functions. The implementation is a bit of a kludge, but they're there.




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