"PHP doesn't really blaze a trail of innovation," admitted Rasmus Lerdorf, who created and now helps maintain the Web programming language. Lerdorf about the past and the future of PHP at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, being held this week in Portland, Oregon.

Lerdorf's talk was a timely one, given the increasing rancor the language has seemingly provoked over the past few years. In an essay that was widely circulated on Twitter, developer Alex Munroe a litany of what he felt were bad design decisions behind the language.

"Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can't even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic," Munroe wrote.

Others had also . Even "New York" magazine -- not exactly known for its technical acumen -- has piled on, , "PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat."

"I had no intention of writing a language. I didn't have a clue how to write a language. I didn't want to write a language," Lerdorf said of PHP's origins. "I just wanted to solve a problem of churning out Web applications very, very fast."