Joe Duffy's article on error models is a treasure trove of language design insights: https://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/
For example, I was interested to learn that error codes are not the most efficient approach, despite their simplicity.
miniblog.
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The PHP 1.0 announcement has aged pretty well! Rasmus focuses on simplicity, how little you need to get started, and the things you can build.
This convenience and pragmatism has been a major factor in PHP's success.
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There's a seedy underbelly of refactoring tools that work most of the time.
For example, grep and sed can perform function renaming. For a small codebase, this works well (you can test or eyeball the result).
Ideally we'd only use fully correct tools, but simplicity often wins.
Conceptual simplicity does not always mean shorter code. I strongly prefer (add1 x) to (+ x 1), despite the latter being fewer keystrokes.