Bruce Eckel, the guy who wrote my favorite Java book, writes a paean to PHP:

I had somehow gotten the impression that PHP was a kind of Perl derivative, probably from the ‘$’ before the variables. As I learn about it, however, it seems more like C than anything else. C with ‘$’s in front of the variables.

It also seems very consistent and well thought-out. Language features seem to follow logically from each other and so far I haven’t found anything particularly surprising — no special cases. Of course, I am getting on board at PHP 5, which seems to have worked out all the kinks, and added objects, which seem to be an amalgam of C++ and Java (mostly Java) with ‘->’ instead of ‘.’ for member selection.

I’m surprised to disagree with him so strongly. PHP makes me want to kill myself. Not as much as it did 6 months ago, but still.