> This is the norm in PHP because, like the author said, it makes it incredibly easy to write bad code.

I do maintenance for a lot of PHP sites at my job, and the code is staggeringly difficult to debug or modify. It's punishment for my sins.

PHP was a tool for generating textual data structures (HTML) and it should've been leveraged by another tool for control flow and business logic, but it wasn't. The code I maintain is pre-frameworks; it's got no DRY, no separation of concerns, no design forethought at all. It's just HTML generation that satisfies its needs as they arise.

Now PHP is a quirky, mediocre, and capable language that's still really good at generating HTML.