Having used PHP actively for 9 years, having seen it 'evolve', and having started with a number of different languages/platforms (Python and Node.js in particular), I can say without a doubt that PHP is still awful.
Yes, things are being improved. But in terms of language usability and consistency, PHP is still miles behind pretty much everything else, especially given the slow deployment of new versions of PHP. As for "unfounded criticism"... some particular inconsistencies have been fixed, but the original criticisms are still valid - they just apply to different things now.
If you look into the way the PHP interpreter actually works internally, you'd rapidly find that suggestions like "methods one can call on the objects themselves" is more or less an impossibility. As far as I'm aware, rather than treating base types as special kinds of objects, PHP seems to treat them as entirely differerent types, which leads to something like "calling a method on it" being a technical impossibility in the current architecture.
I'm absolutely not an expert on the internals of PHP - but from the design flaws that leak through at times, it becomes obvious that the PHP internals consist of a lot of hard-to-maintain code bloat, and that code reuse/abstraction is not as common as it should be. One particular example I ran across myself was this: http://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/1twal5/really_php_re... (the paste no longer exists, sorry for that).
> PHP seems to treat them as entirely differerent types, which leads to something like "calling a method on it" being a technical impossibility in the current architecture.
Most platforms treat scalars as entirely different types at some level and then paper over the differences. As for the PHP architecture, I've actually looked into this, and it would take only one small change to the method-call code to add methods to scalars. In fact, the design of PHP makes this surprisingly easy to add.
Yes, things are being improved. But in terms of language usability and consistency, PHP is still miles behind pretty much everything else, especially given the slow deployment of new versions of PHP. As for "unfounded criticism"... some particular inconsistencies have been fixed, but the original criticisms are still valid - they just apply to different things now.
If you look into the way the PHP interpreter actually works internally, you'd rapidly find that suggestions like "methods one can call on the objects themselves" is more or less an impossibility. As far as I'm aware, rather than treating base types as special kinds of objects, PHP seems to treat them as entirely differerent types, which leads to something like "calling a method on it" being a technical impossibility in the current architecture.
I'm absolutely not an expert on the internals of PHP - but from the design flaws that leak through at times, it becomes obvious that the PHP internals consist of a lot of hard-to-maintain code bloat, and that code reuse/abstraction is not as common as it should be. One particular example I ran across myself was this: http://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/1twal5/really_php_re... (the paste no longer exists, sorry for that).