PHP: a fractal of bad design (fuzzy notepad)

The situation is the same for MS Access, only so much worse. Excel's is bug-free, predictable and of limited scope (at least by comparison). There's only so much trouble you can get in to with Excel, with Access you generally shoot yourself in the foot in slow-motion such that nothing really works but no one can tell until months or years down the line when it finally is revealed that all that excellent data you'd been basing your operations on is:

(1) Incomplete
(2) Incorrect
(3) Viewable by Timmy the intern
(3) Deletable by Timmy the intern
(3) Gone (and no one can find Timmy)

This is what happens when rank amateurs are left in charge of database design on a DBMS which allows you to get away with anything and relegates access control to an optional afterthought.

To keep this topical, I think the bad reputation of PHP web apps can be partly blamed on MySQL. If ever a language like PHP could meet its perfect partner in doing friendly disservice to its users, mysql is it.