The pragmatism of rasmus, and how bemused he was that people were using his language to program (vs. template), meant that the BDFL was not a great advocate of the PHP model.

The model is this: run-once-and-die + build-it-on-the-server.

Those two ideas are extremely powerful, a little like immutability, in that they rule out a huge number of issues. The issue with PHP wasn't this model which became associated with the morass of amateurs using the language. A shame.