I was a sysadmin through the 2000s and was responsible for maintaining php installs across a fleet of ~700 shared web servers. People thought php sucked back t

I was a sysadmin through the 2000s and was responsible for maintaining php installs across a fleet of ~700 shared web servers. People thought php sucked back then because it was obviously trash. TFA isn't even touching on any of the very real unmitigated embarrassing failures in the decade of php growth leading up to 2014. At one point I rolled out a php cgi update that broke something like 10% of customer scripts which upon investigation was due to the scripts containing mismatched curly braces. Pre-update, they worked well enough for the customers to have the impression that nothing was wrong. Post-update, all the sudden the php interpreter noticed these scripts didn't even have correctly enclosed code blocks. There'd be an open curly brace with no closing brace, or vice versa. It was lots of jibberish, and earlier versions of php did not care and if the random results were consistent with expectations, you carried on. The fact that there was a post-1.0 php interpreter in widespread production use silently accepting such syntactically incorrect code clearly demonstrated to those stuck responsible for keeping this stuff ~working, while rolling out seemingly endless urgent security fixes, that php was a raging dumpster fire pushed by a clown car.