Or perhaps it was easy to learn for novices, or easy to deploy...<p>This is a straw man. Citing 2 popular web sites and 1 application doesn&#x27;t mean PHP is a well designed language. You could just as well have picked 2 other web sites written in Java to argue that PHP is rubbish.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t even call it influential, unless language developers have been inspired about how not to design a language. Popular, yes, but not influential. I don&#x27;t see anything from it being incorporated into other languages. It generally seems to have been playing catch up in terms of features, in a similar way to javascript (where there it&#x27;s less about catch-up and more about breaking out of the browser &amp; supporting OO).