Terrifying? Really?
PHP is (admittedly slowly) moving in a positive direction because of community effort, Rasmus' opinion shouldn't terrify anyone since he's just one vote of many.
PHP is (admittedly slowly) moving in a positive direction because of community effort, Rasmus' opinion shouldn't terrify anyone since he's just one vote of many.
It took a decade for these web programming communities to introduce and/or build on ideas from 1958. Long before the web.
PHP is better, however Rasmus' philosophy (while ok at the time) permeates PHP's design and it hurts. It hurts a lot.
Perl was far more widespread early on (96-99) than PHP was, but it was quite painful to deal with compared to PHP. PHP made web stuff dead simple, and that's why it 'won'. CF and VBS never really stood a chance because of the extra costs involved. iHTML, HTML/OS and others were all vying for a foot in the door at this stage, but all were second-run players charging money for something that 99% of hosts were never going to pay for, and therefore devs wouldn't get exposed to those tools.