PHP "associative" arrays are modeled after AWK, which is in turn modeled after SNOBOL4. All of this predates JSON, by decades. https://ia903404.us.archive.org

PHP "associative" arrays are modeled after AWK, which is in turn modeled after SNOBOL4. All of this predates JSON, by decades. https://ia903404.us.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_Programming_Language.pdf https://ia903404.us.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC... Page 182: "Associative arrays were inspired by SNOBOL4 tables, although they are not as general. Awk was born on a slow machine with a small memory, and the properties of arrays were a result of that environment. Restricting subscripts to be strings is one manifestation, as is the restriction to a single dimension (even with syntactic sugar). A more general implementation would allow multidimensional arrays, or at least allow arrays to be array elements."