Comment by withinboredom

I'm being serious in using it as an example of maintainability/expressiveness. The difference is deliberate, not accidental. I've written 15 PHP lines that would be hundreds of lines in C#, and I've written 15 lines of Go that would be hundreds of lines of PHP. Every language has its own strengths and weaknesses and levels of complexity. PHP fits into a sweet spot (IMHO) of low-levelness and high-levelness, but it is often not seriously considered due to its reputation in the 00's.