"Finally makes it much more easy, and much more readable, to do the right thing."
I think this gets to the heart of what feels 'off' about PHP to me: this kind of passive-aggressiveness against "doing the right thing" seems built-in. Kind of like how in order to avoid XSS, PHP offers htmlspecialchars(), or to avoid SQL injection, mysql_real_escape_string() (I'm aware of PDO, but it seems few if any major projects use it).
I think this gets to the heart of what feels 'off' about PHP to me: this kind of passive-aggressiveness against "doing the right thing" seems built-in. Kind of like how in order to avoid XSS, PHP offers htmlspecialchars(), or to avoid SQL injection, mysql_real_escape_string() (I'm aware of PDO, but it seems few if any major projects use it).