Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.

There are some absolutely insane systems out there.

When I was in undergrad we used CF quite a bit for the custom university applications. I cut a lot of my wed development teeth on it. But everyone hated it. So we were actually quite excited to get a PHP server. It could run open source alternatives to Blackboard after all!

I played around with PHP quite a bit in my senior year and got a job as a developer working for a PHP shop when I graduated. Boy was I absolutely disillusioned within 12 months. PHP nearly ruined my love of computers. It was an abusive relationship: I would spend my working hours writing horrible little patches to ancient systems that were made of spaghetti 10 miles long, then go home and night and weekend try to write beautiful code in PHP. The more little patches I wrote the more I felt the need to somehow make them right.

I escaped to Python and JS and have done a lot of therapy since. Doing much better these days, thankfully. My addiction to C seems like such a minor vice in comparison.

Next someone is gonna pipe up and say they used AI to enable them to continue using FrontPage extensions to keep their php+cf sites working

They're well-documented, well-supported products.

What gives me cold sweats are custom application servers that no one knows how they work.