This strikes me as a bizarre statement. What's more universal than "echo" and "$", which are found in nearly every UNIX shell? UNIX has always been the backbone OS of the Internet, thus a language designed specifically for that purpose would naturally bring along some of those conventions common to administrators experience. (Technically, it probably happened this way in PHP because of the restraints of the way PHP began, but that's not to say $ and echo wouldn't have been natural choices, even if PHP had been more ambitious early on.)

There are many things to complain about in PHP, but these two conventions were not invented for or by the PHP developers.

I get your point, of course...but when you use examples like this, picking on what is very likely the most popular language in the world for developing web applications, it just makes me think you're really saying, "Why does PHP suck?"

Why doesn't Ruby use PHP syntax? After all, if we're going to agree on syntax, shouldn't the one that the largest number of people are already fluent in be the one we choose? Should we go back to earlier languages? Should Python have gone with C-like syntax, like Perl, since C syntax is far more common? Who decides what the right syntax is for all languages to converge on?

I think I have to conclude your question is invalid.