Not disputing or supporting your particular point about the style here, but problems with PHP as a language and problems with PHP as coded by a particular developer are two different things.
Weirdly, people seem to ascribe the latter to the former rather often around here.
The same rant can be made on PHP and this code is just a very vivid example of this point.
PHP is not a fractal of bad design, a language is primarily a media to convey ideas and concept from human to humans and actually if the culture of the users is sub level, whatever the quality of the language is the code will be shitty.
PHP has attained a critical mass of ignorant developers that are dragging not only their whole language down but also of the whole eco system (managers, sysadmins...), so PHP is not only a bad language it is also a bad culture we should try to eradicate :)
Is someone forcing you to use PHP? If you don't like it, don't use it. If you don't like the culture, then by all means, either try to improve it or don't participate in it. Luckily, the universe of software is large enough that you need never touch PHP if you don't want to. PHP is just a tool, one which many developers find useful, and which yes supports a lot of shitty code. Go make an app in Django or Rails or... whatever. The world is your oyster.
But the idea that it should be 'eradicated' is just plain silly. If we eradicated every language some random purist found offensive we'd be left coding in raw binary.
And yes I am forced to use PHP or any cited bullshitware because all these coders are intoxicating my customers with false hope, and false expectations that after close lookups (especially the Total Cost of Ownership including maintaining) systematically fail to deliver what was promised.
Would you listen to someone who says coding correctly takes time but maintaining will be easy or the enthusiasts that are saying I have a framework that "works" (but is not) and I can deliver in no time? (disregarding the actual quality of the code they are using, or the operational complexity (thus additional recurring costs), or ignoring the big O notations). Advocates of BSware don't care about the details. But the devil lies in the details.
There is no shortcut for being a decent programmer; you have to have the control over everything.
I say it loud and clear: because of their culture some language and tools turn decent smart people into incompetent frauds that contaminate the work of every developers. Incompetency is a cancer that contaminates the economy and costs an awful lots of bucks.
By all means then... because we are all thoroughly tired of bloat, conceptual flaws and security issues in our code... enlighten we simple peons as to the language we should rather be writing our web apps in.
And you can't say C, because PHP is already a wrapper for C, and of course PHP is terrible.
Weirdly, people seem to ascribe the latter to the former rather often around here.