PHP 5.4.0 released

It's funny, I dislike PHP too, but I'm very familiar with it and use it all the time (imposed for reasons I mentioned elsewhere). And while I can think of many stupid things about PHP, the things you mention would be at the bottom of the list at most, and in some cases I don't even see them.

- Rule of Repair violation. The only place I really see this is in the fact that it's a loosely-typed (and dynamically-typed) language with implicit conversion. While these attributes certainly annoy programmers used to a different type of language, there's nothing inherently wrong with them.

- Turing tarpit. Not even close; in fact it's more of a kitchen-sink language, with everything thrown in with little regard to consistency.

- "help you by adding security holes". Very true, but most of this can be avoided with proper php.ini configuration (though the existence of such a thing is itself a big problem) combined with a "good parts" approach to the language. This is where a novice really causes havoc with PHP, and why I cringe at its common "non-programmer" uses.

- Regular expressions. OK, so they don't perform as well as they could. So what? If you want performance you're looking in the wrong place anyway, and if you're coming from Perl and want a little more speed you just need to use regexes a little less.

All that said, I do think PHP deserves quite a bit of ridicule. It's the most wildly inconsistent language I've ever seen taken seriously, didn't gain anonymous functions (sorta) until the last major release (despite having array-transformation functions that need that sort of thing), and only now is getting a sane array syntax. My years doing Ruby instead were great (except for deployment/sysadmin), and these days I'm much happier when I can do Javascript (including some server-side) than when I'm doing PHP.