You are comparing a framework to a language though. Escaping in PHP is usually handled by the templating component, you don't go around writing htmlentities() everywhere.
PHP comes with a Web framework built in (that's what things like `$_GET`, `$_POST`, `htmlentities`, etc. are). It is also a templating language, that's why we need to write `<?` at the start (to open a PHP tag).
