I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virtues often lost in the quest for novelty and elegance), and he conspicuously disdains excess. Check out his 2008 DrupalCon presentation and you will see that he is a straight shooter who does not curry favor or spare the ignorant.

How do you square that with him having designed a byzantine language, written an inefficient implementation, and built a standard library that's the most excessive of all time?

The things he disdains as novel in other languages are 40 years old — as old as he is!

And how do you square your view with the fact that PHP is one of the most pervasive languages out there? If it is so terribly inefficient and byzantine, then nobody in their right mind should be using it. Yet they do. So they are either all crazy, or perhaps the things you don't like about it aren't actually very important to most people. They probably like the fact that you can get things done extremely quickly in it.

One of my favorite quote from Rasmus:

I have said so many times, PHP is not about purity in CS principles or architecture, it is about solving the ugly web problem with an admittedly ugly, but extremely functional and convenient solution. If you are looking for purity you are in the wrong boat. Get out now before you get hit by a wet cat!

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