Part of the objection raised here is that the php maintainers are not amenable to fixing these problems with the language. Maintaining a private fork of the language with different semantics is both a recipe for disaster and at best a local solution.
Bug reports have been filed and closed for many of these issues.
A full on fork of php might be interesting, though the thought of what's going on behind the scenes in the php interpreter terrifies me.
Almost like posting something about a beowulf cluster of something on Slashdot a few years ago...
That having been said, I agree PHP does what it was designed to do, but has been leveraged into pretending to be a general purpose language (much like what happened with perl)... which it is NOT really good for.
* PHP is open source. If you don't like it, change it. Or submit patches. Or bug reports
* PHP does what is says on the can. It's a hypertext preprocessor, and it does this exceedingly well
* If you're having difficulty doing complex work in PHP, you're using it for the wrong problem
The anti-PHP stance on HN is almost meme like. The lack of silly memes is why I respect HN over other aggregators,