I have used both for different purposes and I can honestly say conceptually C is a very clean, fast assembly language substitute. If some dumb programmer pulls together 20 C libraries with different semantics and does not properly abstract over them and unify things it's the programmer that's the problem. PHP is fundamentally messy because of just that reason PLUS other significant problems at the language, not library level.
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I have used both for different purposes and I can honestly say conceptually C is a very clean, fast assembly language substitute. If some dumb programmer pulls together 20 C libraries with different semantics and does not properly abstract over them and unify things it's the programmer that's the problem. PHP is fundamentally messy because of just that reason PLUS other significant problems at the language, not library level.