> One of my biggest issues with PHP is that it doesn't cleanly separate the app and the system.

Its probably been a couple decades since I looked at PHP stuff (like php4 was probably the last version I used, though PHP5 might have just been released), but isn't that kind of how the main interpreter was implemented, and many of the patterns built into the language? IIRC there were things like default paths based on OS to system configs and stuff like that.

It never struck me as something that was designed to be ran as a user, but installed on a system and utilized by users. I'm just going by gut feels, but its my perception that other interpreters have more relative paths than PHP.