There's something about the construction of the PHP language that is not good enough for me.
For example, the name of the functions. It is a non best practice use a several ways to name a function in one language. The mixture between underscores (function_name), words stick together (functionname), etc.I mean, this is really a mess. There are too many functions that are very similar or do the same things, but their names are so confusing. This is not characteristic of a good programming language.
In large deployments, the language must be enough easy and specific to write. Something that PHP omits like the declaration of variable types, become very difficult to understand and deal with later.
Other point is the constant addition of features and canceling of some other. It supposes that the addition of OOP in PHP 5 gonna make the things easier for programmers, but what about the considerations of back compatibility?
The principal reason that this programming language is like it is, is due to its origins: Personal Home Page. It was not designed for large deployments.
I know that there are great efforts to make this language an enterprise-weight language, and personally, I'm waiting for a good enough open source server-side programming language; but until this day comes, it's gonna run a lot of water under the bridge.
