Most beginners are not going to be looking at their error log, or even know where to look for it. In a development environment, I think display_errors is a very reasonable behavior, and is in line with PHP's goals: be easy to get up and running, even (especially?) for novice programmers. Even people that have been doing this for a decade may forget to tail their logs, so having execution-time warnings makes a lot of sense, and is really the only practical approach for an interpreted language.
I've made vague suggestions (though not written up a full spec/RFC... one of these days) about improving the overall error handling system in PHP since I think there are a limited set of common behaviors that involve a lot of repeated code to get, which basically amount to "use strict". That way people doing serious projects that need a flexible language can get decent and consistent error handling, and newbies hacking together their first dynamic website can continue to work without hitting a brick wall of a learning curve.
When I was first learning to code, something like display_errors would have been great. As it was I just had a few compiler warnings, but (especially as a newbie) who cares as long as it compiles and runs? Getting random warning text printed out on your web page is a real incentive to fix things, but without being so harsh that you just give up. Of course that doesn't scale to larger projects, but it doesn't need to. In PHP's case, that's what set_error_handler() is for.
I've made vague suggestions (though not written up a full spec/RFC... one of these days) about improving the overall error handling system in PHP since I think there are a limited set of common behaviors that involve a lot of repeated code to get, which basically amount to "use strict". That way people doing serious projects that need a flexible language can get decent and consistent error handling, and newbies hacking together their first dynamic website can continue to work without hitting a brick wall of a learning curve.
When I was first learning to code, something like display_errors would have been great. As it was I just had a few compiler warnings, but (especially as a newbie) who cares as long as it compiles and runs? Getting random warning text printed out on your web page is a real incentive to fix things, but without being so harsh that you just give up. Of course that doesn't scale to larger projects, but it doesn't need to. In PHP's case, that's what set_error_handler() is for.