I don't know if it's changed recently but that's something I really appreciated when I wrote PHP: it was unabashedly singular in it's purpose as a web scripting language. The source article talked about VB6 as being a language where the GUI was a first class thing; for PHP the only focus was on making applications around web requests. No useless bloat while trying to be a general purpose shell scripting language; no delusions of grandeur of trying to be an enterprise business logic tier language... it did it's one task, did it well, and left other languages to other tasks. I think we would be better served to have languages will small standard libraries focuses on specific tasks rather than gigantic one-language-to-do-everything but about which nobody could possibly know everything (ahem C# ahem).
I don't know if it's changed recently but that's something I really appreciated when I wrote PHP: it was unabashedly singular in it's purpose as a web scripting language. The source article talked about VB6 as being a language where the GUI was a first class thing; for PHP the only focus was on making applications around web requests. No useless bloat while trying to be a general purpose shell scripting language; no delusions of grandeur of trying to be an enterprise business logic tier language... it did it's one task, did it well, and left other languages to other tasks. I think we would be better served to have languages will small standard libraries focuses on specific tasks rather than gigantic one-language-to-do-everything but about which nobody could possibly know everything (ahem C# ahem).