&gt; In all fairness this is ancient history on the PHP world.<p>No, because PHP still work that way (hypertext pre-processor) and Yes because, PHP has frameworks that makes PHP work like other solutions (Ruby,Python,Java + frameworks), but one still need a &lt;?php on top of a file.<p>And again, a lot of PHP developers despise these frameworks and question their usefulness. In theory, they are right since PHP is a template language which goal is to render text content, and separation of concerns can be easily achieve without a complex framework in the case of a web application. In practice a framework makes large codebases more maintainable, no question.<p>PHP is a strange beast. It&#x27;s somehow rigid like Java, at least more rigid than most dynamic languages, it&#x27;s a dynamic language, and a template language and it keeps on getting stuff from Java like languages (PHP 7).<p>It&#x27;s ironic that PHP was created because its author kind of found Perl too difficult to use for web dev, then wasn&#x27;t taken seriously by pros then tried to imitate Java in some ways to feel more professional and now is on part with Perl in terms of complexity, while half of the PHP community praises over engineered codebases often found in the JEE world.