Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1994 as a small set of Perl scripts to track visits to his online CV. He called it “Personal Home Page Tools,” had no intention of building a programming language, and has spent much of the subsequent thirty years being diplomatically candid about this. PHP grew organically, accumulating features, inconsistencies, and a function library where the argument order changes seemingly at random between calls. It became, despite everything, the language powering WordPress, Wikipedia, and vast swathes of the web. Critics have written essays cataloguing its design flaws. Lerdorf has acknowledged most of them. PHP’s market share has remained stubbornly enormous throughout, suggesting the internet is considerably more tolerant of inconsistency than its developers.
