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by CJefferson 3140 days ago
I don't think they accidentally became popular.

The features which make a language rise rapidly might just be different to the features that make a language "good".

PHP in particular is amazing for getting started at speed. I remember taking a HTML file and popping in a couple of lines of PHP in the middle. I still haven't found anything anywhere near that easy for making a server backed website.
2 comments
jandrese 3140 days ago
You aren't the first person to think of this. It is otherwise known as Worse is Better[1]. Stuff that doesn't have all of that nice formalism but lets you get simple applications working without a lot of up-front training and boilerplate tends to be what people gravitate towards instead of "properly designed" languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

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busterarm 3140 days ago
For very limited tasks that PHP is still oddly popular for: NGINX's Server Side Includes module. ;)

If that's already your web server, anyway.

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