Well, but English is a very pragmatic language, "importing" ideas (vocabulary, mainly) freely from other languages, with a rather loose (dare I say "messy"? Com

Well, but English is a very pragmatic language, "importing" ideas (vocabulary, mainly) freely from other languages, with a rather loose (dare I say "messy"? Compared to Latin, at least...) syntax that offers a lot of flexibility, making, as they say, easy things easy and hard things possible, choosing expressiveness over conceptual clarity/elegance. Sounds a little like Perl to me. ;-) OTOH, PHP has taken inspiration from Perl, so I do not disagree very strongly.