But there's a culture thing, too. In case of many programming languages, there's certain culture built around them - with its own hierarchy of values, its own

But there's a culture thing, too. In case of many programming languages, there's certain culture built around them - with its own hierarchy of values, its own idiosyncrasies, approach and so on. Like the tendency of overengineering and devotion to design patterns in Java world. Now, the idea behind PHP is to "just get it working". This philosophy is perfectly summed up by PHP's inventor, Lerdorf: "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests. " Of course the qoute may be tongue-in-cheek, but I'd say the mindset is real. (I've written software in C#, Java and PHP)