A good bit of my work is in php codebases from that era and uh... yeah kinda. Generally at that time (and for a few years after) you still see a huge influence

A good bit of my work is in php codebases from that era and uh... yeah kinda. Generally at that time (and for a few years after) you still see a huge influence from C programming constraints in php. Lot of extremely terse abbreviated variables and explicit looping. And for some fucking reason the pervasive believe that variable names need to be at most either 3 or 6 characters long. (Yes I know the reason it's still bad) So yeah painful as it is to admit that is well above average expressiveness and readability for php of its era.