Wordpress is a fractal image of PHP, in that respect. It's-easy-to-start turns into Hotel California.

Hotel California, from Wikipedia:

>The lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." On the surface, it tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that at first appears inviting and tempting. The song is an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in the Southern California music industry of the late 1970s; Don Henley called it "our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles"[6] and later reiterated "it's basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_California_%28song%29

Luxury? Hedonism? OK, maybe Hotel California is a bad analogy.

It's easy-to-start rapidly turns into a tarpit made of sparrow droppings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roach_motel perhaps?

It's a common case in PHP, but might have less to do with the language's inelegance than the size of the app. I doubt a comparable CMS in Python/Ruby/etc, with a similar number of contributors and plugins developed over 8 years would really be much better.

(Rails/Django might be a different case, due to the benefits of having an MVC framework as base. But these exist in PHP as well)

I haven't looked at wordpress code in a really long time, but 5 or so years ago I had to hack up a wordpress install for a client. There was one giant monolithic method that created a string for the sql query to get the posts for pretty much every imaginable part of a wordpress site that is an index of posts. there was a combinatorial explosion of options you could pass this monolith and it was nearly impossible as someone who didn't write it to figure out how to make it do something really simple like add paging to the RSS url.

There is no reason any code in any language should have this sort of problem. It isn't merely cruft from a long legacy of existence.

Wordpress codebase sucks by all accounts, I'm just wondering if this is related to PHP or we'd see something like this in every non-framework code, regardless of language.

It isn't related to php and it isn't something we should see in any code.