[alyandon]

Rightly or wrongly, many PHP functions are thin wrappers around third-party C libraries and they tend to return values without interpretation of the results.

For your example of openssl_verify see https://linux.die.net/man/3/x509_verify_cert

It can certainly be confusing but at least it is documented.

[PhasmaFelis]

I'm curious who it was who first started implementing those wrappers and thought "Yeah, this is good enough."

[mkr-hn]

The late '90s and early '00s were a strange time. It had plenty of shotguns aimed at feet and no one to suggest a better approach. At least no one with enough reach.

Also [1]:

>> "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way"

I assume he's better at it 16 years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#History