you are right. PHP has a big and active community support and most of the times, you will find the solution just by googling it. And just one tip that you might find helpful is that you don’t necessarily need closing PHP tag i.e ?> . Its optional. However, I would recomment to always use it as it makes the code more readable.

It’s a function of PHP’s origins. In the bad old days, you’d just write HTML and sprinkle it with php-tags and variables.

Files accessed from PHP are processed sequentially, so PHP does not do any work until it sees a would invoke PHP which would throw an error and die.

I remember spending countless hours chasing down syntax errors in PHP. A missing } could take ages to find, because the error would not get thrown before the end of the PHP tag, and if it was a long file, one would sit there counting brackets for a long time.

Thankfully, we have more advanced tools today. And perhaps I’ve gotten better at programming, too