One of our acquisitions was one guy with no real background in tech working over a few years in his spare time and turning a project into a multi-million dollar

One of our acquisitions was one guy with no real background in tech working over a few years in his spare time and turning a project into a multi-million dollar business competing well against other entries in the market put together by teams of a dozen or more actual developers with millions in VC funding. And that was a project originally targeting PHP 4 and, by the time I was brought on, had made it all the way up to 5.x. I mean, yeah, the code is garbage, but if he weren't allowed to write garbage code _he just wouldn't have written the code at all_. If that guy had to sit and learn proper paradigms and server administration and a bunch of other stuff, he would have just gone out and done something else instead. Yeah, PHP lets you write shitty code (though it also lets you write _good_ code...). But in lowering the barrier to entry as it does, it also lets people who don't know how to write great code turn their ideas into reality. Unlike the suggestion of another comment, I've got a great deal of experience with "saner" languages, but despite PHP getting a bad rap because of its low barrier to entry I still admire PHP as a great equalizer.