[billisonline]

> If using the language's standard libraries is "absolutely doing it wrong"

You are being deliberately obtuse. Other comments in this thread offer correct examples of using PDO to avoid SQL injection. I didn’t mean it was impossible to write safe database code using the standard library—obviously, PHP is a Turing-complete language, it can be done!—I just meant it’s awkward, and verbose, and developers are unlikely to do it consistently throughout an application. Hence this type of concern is best abstracted into a library.

To your point about “indicting a language,” most languages have footguns like this. The worst you can say about PHP is that the documentation should do more to discourage new users from working with PDO directly. (And I mean the official documentation—the language maintainers can’t be held responsible for the kind of unofficial tutorials the article complains about.) But regardless of what the official docs say, most PHP development today is done using frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and Zend framework that do not suffer from SQL injection issues.