I remember on an old crypto mailing list some lowly PHP programmer asking if instead of a grab bag of primitives there was some library where he could just encrypt/decrypt a random object. Without having to build a Frankenstein thing out of random cryptographic parts.

Everyone peed on him and he never came back.

The poor sap was right though. The proven algorithms tend to fail catastrophically when used or implemented incorrectly.

Ironically now PHP is one of the few high-level languages doing this right, with built-in libsodium support and an excellent idiot-proof library available in Halite on top of that.

Agreed. And it even has a global you can use for the cipher that is updated along with the php version.