Hackability

Yes, that's my point. PHP's "hackability" has nothing to do with its merits as a language -- if it did, then it would have been strangled at birth. Its "hackability" is that random users can open up a file, see some HTML and familiar bits of their webpage and bits of code scattered around, and start copy-pasting and tweaking to get it to do something different. The code is horrible, but easily accessible for tweaking. PHP's success is entirely due to its providing a "low-key entry path for folks who are not yet at the level of [doing real programming]".

Also, typical PHP web-pages and typical SysV init scripts probably have comparable levels of copy-pasted code...