Personally I call PHP crappy because it could easily have been much better at its main goal without sacrificing anything from its other goals, but for some reason it wasn't, and now we have to live with the stupid early decisions for compatibility reasons (eg there's no good reason for the mess of strFunc, str_func, string_func, funcstr, needle/haystack, haystack/needle, etc. When the main goal is being super-productive early on, being able to use the most basic functions without constantly looking up their order of parameters would be a great help)
He freely admits that he is a crappy programmer who can't write languages. His goal was to re-use code because he hated (hates) programming.
That doesn't really explain why contributors perpetuate the atrocity, but understand that PHP is the way it is based on a set of priorities that many of us do not value.
