zlacker

The thing is, I've seen sloppy, hacked-together code in finance, in a variety of languages, including Java and C, where the barrier to entry is relatively high, and the language fairly strict. You just don't hear about the coding fiascos, as they're mostly behind closed doors.

PHP has a low barrier to entry, but that's a great thing in my opinion. It's something that should be celebrated, and at the very least, it shouldn't be a criticism!

Bad developers exist in every language, and no language is completely wart-free. People just like to zero in on PHP to criticise it because it's easy, and it bugs me a bit (especially if they're simultaneously singing the praises of another less than perfect language such as JS or Python or Go).

>>osrec+(OP)
PHP had the advantage of having built-in resource limits and little contention over locks and other shared resources that meant sloppy coding wouldn't crash your server. Providers could offer low cost hosting plans because you could put a lot of customers on the same server and have very little trouble. It was a big plus that it was open source and didn't have the crazy high license costs of early dynamic web hosting solutions such as ColdFusion, WiTango, Netscape's application server, etc.