I’ve written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing. People had very good reasons to hate PHP then. It’s greatly improved, but largely due to the composer ecosystem helping to paper over the worse bits. The global functions are still an awful mess.
Composer’s means of including packages doesn’t do the language any favours imo — it doubles down on namespaces (and complex PSR 4/7 ones at that) and the cli isn’t particularly intuitive.
To me, what PHP needs is a simple module system with scoped functions and variables, an object literal syntax rather than `new \stdClass`, and first-class simple to use threading/async/promises for concurrent requests and IO.
