I do not think PHP had design decisions until ... much, much later than day one. I would cautiously say even PHP 4 is more than a bit haphazard and PHP 5.0 I definitely remember as an alpha quality release, 5.1 as beta and 5.2 as stable. Design, I think, started to appear with the later stalled PHP 6 attempt and so mainline 5.3. The first one I remember that can be called a conscious design decision was deferring $this support in closures to 5.4. Correlating with my memories is the first release to appear under the "Implemented" headline on https://wiki.php.net/rfc is 5.3 indeed.
I do not think PHP had design decisions until ... much, much later than day one. I would cautiously say even PHP 4 is more than a bit haphazard and PHP 5.0 I definitely remember as an alpha quality release, 5.1 as beta and 5.2 as stable. Design, I think, started to appear with the later stalled PHP 6 attempt and so mainline 5.3. The first one I remember that can be called a conscious design decision was deferring $this support in closures to 5.4. Correlating with my memories is the first release to appear under the "Implemented" headline on https://wiki.php.net/rfc is 5.3 indeed.