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A provocative defense of PHP and JavaScript as democratizing forces in programming. The author argues these languages succeeded by prioritizing simplicity and accessibility over academic concepts, with PHP's straightforward function-based approach and JavaScript's functional programming features (popularized by Douglas Crockford) making programming more approachable to non-professionals during the 2000s.

Why PHP and JavaScript Are Great (2025)

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PHP is a template engine.
Just use Javascript for higher level and C for lower level.

PHP 8 is a much saner language than JS.
JS design is just trash. Let’s make prototypical design like nothing else and on top of it lets make <code>this</code> semantics be the most wacky thing in existence.
Don’t worry, we will mark everything with <code>class</code> and <code>bind</code> so people are even more confused.
Let’s also make the interpreter do some insane type coercions and conversions to “help” users break their code at runtime faster.
Let’s also add both <code>undefined</code> and <code>null</code> and make variables global my default (tbf 99% of interpreted languages do this).
Let’s also not have an import system so users can create a bunch of solutions they will end up mix and matching (granted there is a standard now but I’d say most code still has legacy commonJS crap).
Let’s also make the most convoluted build systems in existence to the point you need several tools to configure your tools and projects for you.
Your project or browser don’t support a new feature that landed last week? Add these shims so it pretends it doesn’t. Don’t forget to have fun debugging that code.
Having this abomination of a language on the front-end isn’t enough. Let’s port it to the back-end, let’s have 3 or 4 different runtimes for it each with their own APIs, let’s also put it everywhere from microcontrollers to game engines to maximize human suffering.
That’s not enough though! Let’s make a type system on top of it with atrocious built times and make it optional and as academically complex as possible, let’s show Rust how complicated a type can really be even without explicit lifetimes. And let’s make that type system silently break as runtime when there are circular dependencies, let’s not catch those at build time.
The list goes on.
I’m still convinced JS is only widely used and known because it is the only standard on browsers. If it weren’t for that it would have been shunned by now.