> Once upon a time the noobs started with PHP and gave it a bad name with their insecure spaghetti code

My admittedly shallow impression of PHP was that, because of how determined it generally is to keep going despite any errors that may occur, it doesn’t really need outside help to acquire a bad name or amass insecure code.

Now, on one hand, this is an opinion of someone who tried doing PHP for at most a couple of months nearly a decade ago (ugh), so it’s of very limited value. On the other hand, the reason I stopped trying was exactly the above: I found that writing it made me incredibly nervous and that I just couldn’t make peace with the fact that I won’t be able to make my code fail on all reasonable but unforeseen errors. Never before or after have I encountered a language that so actively fought me when I wanted to crash my program (and I’m perfectly comfortable writing C and Forth on microcontrollers). I could’ve been using it wrong, but one way or another that awful impression still lingers.