Not sure if you're just trolling the low-hanging fruit or not but I'll assume not. When PHP came out in 1997 the other available products for putting web sites

Not sure if you're just trolling the low-hanging fruit or not but I'll assume not. When PHP came out in 1997 the other available products for putting web sites together, at least for smaller organizations, were: - ASP (classic, not .Net) - ColdFusion - Perl The first two were proprietary packages that required a license for the software and a license for the operating system (Windows). I got into PHP when a customer wanted to migrate away from Windows/ASP because of licensing fees -- they took the leap with open source, which was a big gamble at the time. The CTO had read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and swallowed the kool-aid. We still had to use SQL Server though, that company was committed to it across all of their applications, so I got to use PHP + ODBC for a while. Fun. Perl had a fairly big base of CGI scripts but in most respects seemed worse than ASP, CF, PHP because Perl had a steep barrier to entry. PHP was an easy choice for shops looking to get off of ASP -- which Microsoft was making noises about discontinuing -- and ColdFusion, which several of my customers back then used, but complained about the cost (Adobe now owns CF). So it was PHP. Then along came WordPress and the PHP world exploded. As you point out the language has had a hard time keeping up with the demands placed on it (Rasmus certainly didn't imagine Facebook-scale sites back then), and the evolving security threats (lots of web sites were purely internal back then, not exposed on the public internet, and the script kiddie hackers were still in nursery school in Kiev). Hosting providers sprung up to offer turn-key PHP/MySQL hosting, with the proviso that the site owner and developers did not control the PHP configuration. Since 1997 a lot has changed and it's easy to point to problems in PHP and say "That could have been done a lot better." And that's true, but no one had that crystal ball back in the mid-90s. The push was to get something on the web. Planning for future maintainability has never been an aspect of software development we can boast about and the PHP code out there today is no different, there's just a lot of it. For my part I push my customers to upgrade to the latest version and to do a security analysis and vulnerability test so we can find and fix the most egregious problems. Even this level of upgrading can get expensive and risky. I wish no one was still running PHP 5.4 in production in 2021 but wishing won't change that it's still fairly common, and companies using that code are only going to call someone like me after they've had a serious problem.