I don't think it's harmful. You just need to know what you're doing. PHP gets a bad rep round here unfairly. It's actually a very useful language which has proven itself over and over again in the wild. I wonder what you think of JavaScript?
It's harmful exactly because it's ridiculously complex. And because it forces a Map/Dict to conform to an Array/List protocol, making it actually worse than both (it loses the O(1) or O(N) access time of the array/list, plus adds a bunch of complexity)
Disagree, it doesn't force anything to be anything else. It is what it is and it's pretty intuitive. PHP never claimed that arrays behave O(C) when accessing members†. It actually reduces complexity because there's only one container type. "Harmful" is ridiculous hyperbole, that's how the language is designed, you may not like how it's designed but not liking something doesn't make it harmful.
