Science Quote by Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP gets framed here as infrastructure, not inspiration: the thing that keeps the internet’s teeth from falling out. Lerdorf’s toothbrush jab is doing two jobs at once. It punctures the tech industry’s reflex to romanticize tools, and it defends a language that’s been endlessly mocked for being unglamorous, inconsistent, or “for beginners”. The wit lands because it swaps the usual hero narrative (the elegant language, the visionary framework) for a household object nobody brags about until it’s missing.

The specific intent is almost managerial: stop demanding that PHP perform as a status symbol. If you’re using it daily, you already know its value. Toothbrushes are boring precisely because they’re reliable and ubiquitous; the boredom is the point. That subtext doubles as a critique of developer culture’s obsession with novelty and hot takes. “Who would want to read about toothbrushes?” isn’t just self-deprecation. It’s a sideways swing at the content economy that inflates minor differences into tribal identity, where choosing a stack becomes a personality.

Context matters: PHP powered a huge swath of early web publishing and still undergirds WordPress and countless legacy systems. Its story is pragmatic and messy, more civil engineering than cathedral-building. Lerdorf, as the language’s creator, effectively refuses the priest role. He’s saying: judge the tool by the plaque it removes, not by whether it looks cool on a conference slide.