These quotes aren't terrifying they help explain why something such as PHP is so successful. The general philosophy was, and still is building something that spits html and can connect to a database in a few lines of spaghetti code. Granted there is a movement in PHP that is as religious regarding TDD,OOP as in the Java world, they don't represent the majority of PHP devs.

PHP execution model satisfies 2 crowds : hosting service providers that can provide cheap hosting to the second group of people, hobbyists that just want to install wordpress or write a "dynamic" page.

The later will never care about OOP,TDD,FP,Agile, and stuff like that. In PHP you begin with writing HTML then you put the PHP code. not the other way around,no matter how hard "advanced users" try to deny that fact, PHP scripts begin with a TAG,it is,first and foremost, a templating language that generates HTML files.

The sad thing is that it could have been done a better way. But serious language designers were too pedantic and arrogant to write simple solutions. Rasmus lazyness paid off ...