Succinctly put. I'm a fan of worse is better, but this is pushing it way too much. PHP's like a bunch of infinite monkeys whacking on keyboards, alternatively coming up with brilliant stuff like
SimpleXML, Wordpress and Drupal, or brillant [
sic] stuff like the namespaces fiasco (
":::" is "hard to parse/easy to be confused"), and magic_quotes and register_globals. Utterly tasteless decisions.