loosely typed: the fact that it was necessary to invent a new operator (===) in an attempt to cover up bad design should be enough of an indication
using variables without declaring them first: leads to a whole range of near-impossible to track down bugs (the standard warning is a joke since it misses out on most of them and the ones it does spot are actually valid cases)
half-baked OO support: PHP 5 is an improvement but they only did half a job (try/catch with no finally; method "overloading" is a total misnomer; totally botched up get/set accessors; etc)
references which aren't actually references at all: mostly fixed in PHP 5
highly inconsistent API naming even within the same group of functions: isA() vs is_B()
lack of proper documentation, coupled with a high amount of inaccurate information: the quality of information on most PHP sites is either missing the point or completely wrong
lack of proper debugging tools: even Zend can't seem to manage to produce a decent and modern debugger. PHP 5 attempts to introduce some native debugging functions but in most cases they're completely off the mark
run-time compilation: I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason why PHP doesn't have development-time compilation (yields better code; infinitely more chances for compiler opmitizations; etc) is so Zend can keep charging for indispensible functionality
modular and customizable to a ridiculous (and highly insecure) extent: modularity is arguably a good thing but in practice it turns out to be a nightmare if your script happens to rely on a "default" module that a shared host happens to decide is unnecessary and pulls out of their build
questionably cross-platform: some functionality is there on one OS, but not on the other; and worse certain functions behave differently depending on the underlying OS
extensions only expose the bare minimum functionality: one personal big gripe is that MySQL extension doesn't support multiple statements in one query

There's lots more but that's enough of a rant for now.

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Downfalls of PHP...

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