It's strange that, given how badly designed PHP really is, it's so surprisingly flexible that things like my PHP preprocessor can exist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861616

I'm sure you could write a shorter, (maybe) faster, cleaner preprocessor for Python, Java or Erlang, but I'm not sure it would be a viable solution, there. With PHP, I got this 'mostly unused hash comments' thing readily available, like a low-hanging fruit. And then, there was token_get_all() - the squeezer...