Yeah, and also: Who gives a shit? It's the convention they chose, just adapt to it and get over it, or program in a different language.

People who like to complain about PHP are rarely the same people who use it every day.

I have to use PHP every day and I rarely go a day without complaining about it.

You're the exception, not the rule.

I mostly hear C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc. devs complain about PHP. Very rarely actual PHP developers.

And typically, their complaints are less of the moan-ass "waaah, they use a \ for namespace separation" and more "ugh, why don't they disabled emulated prepared statements by default"?

Only one side is constructive.

None of those who are complaining about the monument of shit being erected outside of town is actually an erector of monuments made of shit.

Typically, their complaints are about the ugly appearance and smell.

Only one side is constructive.

I still don't get what stopped them from using any of the existing operators.

Rationale was discussed on IRC, see:

https://wiki.php.net/_media/rfc/php.ns.txt

Linked to at the bottom of:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceseparator

I skimmed through it but couldn't really understand why they couldn't coopt one of the existing operators (for example, by making classes have a namespace for their methods)

Couldn't they provide a clearer explanation than simply dumping a huge IRC log like that??

Basically namespaces operate at a different level. You can almost imagine it like Macro expansion -- the namespaces are fully resolved for all the symbols in the file and then the compilation happens. This is necessary for a host of reasons. They can't co-opt an existing operator because all the existing operators work at an entirely different level.