Why PHP sucks - farce or is there a bit of truth?

Hi, I've been a PHP programmer for several years now and have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. It's great for doing something quickly, especially web stuff, but recently I have heard people moaning about PHP a lot and did some research and found this: http://webonastick.com/php.html One thing I had to get my head around is this: The ternary operator <?php $foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : ($foo === 2) ? "dos" : "tres"); print("\n"); outputs >> dos because the operator is left-to-right associative instead of right-to-left as in other languages. I was thinking there must be a reason for this. Speed? Is it faster to evaluate/implement all operators as left-to-right? I noticed that the above could easily be fixed by saying: <?php $foo = 1; print(($foo == 1) ? "uno" : (($foo === 2) ? "dos" : "tres")); print("\n"); outputs >> uno Was this a deliberate design decision or is it a flaky implementation of the ternary operator? Tim-Hinnerk Heuer Twitter: @geekdenz Blog: http://www.thheuer.com