PHP's "deep thought" was that in the context of building dynamic web pages, perhaps it made sense to embed a scripting language into HTML itself -- instead of calling out to an external program. There's an example of the initial idea being responsible for much of PHP's enduring success.
And here's an anecdote that explains how it was (lack of) readability in significant indentation that led to Python getting its colon:
> In 1978, in a design session in a mansion in Jabłonna (Poland),
> Robert Dewar, Peter King, Jack Schwartz and Lambert were
> comparing various alternative proposed syntaxes for B, by
> comparing (buggy) bubble sort implementations written down in
> each alternative. Since they couldn't agree, Robert Dewar's wife
> was called from her room and asked for her opinion, like a
> modern-day Paris asked to compare the beauty of Hera, Athena,
> and Aphrodite. But after the first version was explained to her,
> she remarked: "You mean, in the line where it says: 'FOR i ... ',
> that it has to be done for the lines that follow; not just for
> that line?!" And here the scientists realized that the
> misunderstanding would have been avoided if there had been a colon
> at the end of that line.
Perhaps for me "deep thought" means something particular which ends up having wider ramifications. These just seems like anecdotes about known "deep thoughts". The first one the power of templating / macros, the second the power of good syntax.
PHP's "deep thought" was that in the context of building dynamic web pages, perhaps it made sense to embed a scripting language into HTML itself -- instead of calling out to an external program. There's an example of the initial idea being responsible for much of PHP's enduring success.
And here's an anecdote that explains how it was (lack of) readability in significant indentation that led to Python getting its colon:
(from http://python-history.blogspot.com/)