I have actually gotten a tremendous amount of value from PHP and WordPress: the via negativa! They showed me, in remarkable detail, how things should not be designed.

(I'm not kidding. If you take each element of their designs and invert it, you end up with a very solid design.)

On that note, I misspoke somewhat: I assert that PHP and JavaScript were not "badly designed", because that would imply that someone sat down, carefully considered how the different parts of the system interact, second order consequences etc. — and then somehow came to all the incorrect decisions. Rather, it's quite clear a serious design process has simply not occurred to begin with.

Once I recognized this phenomenon, I began to see it in all areas of life. Things are much worse than they could be, simply because nobody has designed them to be good. They just ended up the way they are now, by accident of history.

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Polemic aside, I am fond of JS and PHP in many respects. I just think we should clean them up! "This mess has always been here, so it's too late to clean it now" would be laughed at in any other context.

We already broke compat with "use strict". Now we just need a "use sane" :)