I don't do much PHP anymore but I can see the appeal coming from a c/c++ perspective. When I was doing PHP I felt closer to the metal than I feel with Python now.
A lot of the PHP libraries looked like thin wrapper over well known c libraries. Instead of shoehorning everything to make it PHPonic, the function calls were similar to their c counterpart. You could sometimes even read the man pages for the c libraries if you needed extra details on how the internals worked.
There was a simplicity to this that was appealing to me. The lesser amount of magic and abstraction meant I could more easily visualize what was happening under the hood and find bugs quickly.
A lot of the PHP libraries looked like thin wrapper over well known c libraries. Instead of shoehorning everything to make it PHPonic, the function calls were similar to their c counterpart. You could sometimes even read the man pages for the c libraries if you needed extra details on how the internals worked.
There was a simplicity to this that was appealing to me. The lesser amount of magic and abstraction meant I could more easily visualize what was happening under the hood and find bugs quickly.