Python is the language designed by a guy that did not understand the difference between tail-call optimization (a general, widely useful optimization) and something he made up as a strawman, called "tail-recursion elimination."

PHP began life as the antithesis of "goto considered harmful." The idea to embed a language directly into a mix of HTML/CSS/JS was just profoundly awful. Yet we still bash "goto" as the spaghetti monster. I guess we just can't detect irony today.

To your #1 point, I'm going to have to say there are a large number of powerful, well-funded, well-marketed idiots in this industry. If languages really mattered, we would all be using Scheme, ML, or Haskell or something. People are just now discovering Erlang, thanks to WhatsApp and Facebook. Despite Erlang being a year older than Perl. But Perl didn't make recent headlines for a $19bn sale, so...