PHP features the best of the wicked minds.
In this legacy but still used project just so to save the scourge opening tcp connection (I suppose) some guy wrapped js libs like jQuery, mootools in a script tag.. In individual php files. Then from a main.php include all those libraries. This produces a 2Mb file to send to the client and it's not even compressed. This guy never had any thought about maintenance.

This is one symptom of the problem with PHP that every company developed or have in-house undocumented unmaintained frameworks made by devs without any idea about testing, security and more.

Gosh in a previous work I've seen a PHP cron that used arguments passed to a switch case of 25 cases.

It took 19 years for the language to get a standard, meanwhile leaving the web landscape as a mess of bad coding practices, bad design practices, SQL injections, outdated tutorials and more. PHP is the example that it's not because it's used on almost all the web that it's good, it only means that's it's cheap! Cheap like asking a red neck to build you a car and he tows (deploy) it to your house with his own tow truck he built.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/codin...