Or because it had first mover advantage in its cohort.

berntb · on Oct 13, 2016

It didn't really, AFAIK (not a PHP guy, but old) it got traction because it was easier to get started with than the alternatives.

That said, all environments will be one of three:

1 Have warts. 2 Not be used. 3 Be in denial and claim to be perfect.

The GP had a point, perfection is the enemy of good. Something delivered is better than nothing.

aikah · on Oct 13, 2016

PHP got traction because it was easier for hosting companies to set up shared PHP hosting and it was easier for non developers to add basic code to HTML pages. PHP was also at the right moment at the right time,just like MySQL and some people made it easy to install it on Windows, a platform too often ignored by language maintainers (try to write Ruby on windows, a (slow) pain in the ass).

weberc2 · on Oct 13, 2016

What do you consider its cohort to be? PHP was the first language on my radar that didn't depend on CGI.

berntb · on Oct 13, 2016

Uh, the early versions of PHP was written in Perl running under mod_perl, which was not CGI.

Also, e.g. fastcgi was around the same time frame.

(In order not to end up in a flame war regarding the first point I checked wikipedia -- see second paragraph of the intro here. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_perl )