On Sunday, 22 November 2015 at 10:58:33 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
comments on topic. You take social factors (getting the momentum, gathering large stable community) and derived beneficial factors (good tooling, good platforms, lot of out of the box solutions) and proceed to use it as a backing argument to mostly technical statement ("PHP (as a language) scales"),
Php started at zero like everyone else. It followed a growth pattern like Perl, and did so by accumulating C libraries/APIs and making 5 liners productive.
But it was also reasonable effective compared to perl/python and it most certainly worked better at the small web scale than the alternatives. Working well at the small scale was probably the primary reason for Php's success. And being able to scale up to hosting many websites on a single server reasonable efficiently was also a factor.
So scaling has been a factor for the success of Php, just not the big site scaling. Erlang is probably the only language that has gained momentum because of the ability to scale upwards.
One can also say that PHP is easy language to start with which got in right place in right time with good vision. That contribution snowball effect resulted in having very good platform and collective wisdom, as well as solid developer pool.
The dominant factor has probably been that Php has been perceived as non-professional and unsuitable for serious business all along.
As a result it become a differentiating factor for hosting. Charge a small fee for Php/MySQL aiming at personal sites and small businesses, charge a premium for Python/Java/Postgres/MS etc. But most people want to save money so they went with Php...
Php might have failed if it had been a good enterprise level language, it would have been too attractive to differentiate web host pricing.
