[yllus]

I think PHP had a couple of obvious advantages - it almost had a "first mover" advantage in that it happened to be installed alongside CGI-BIN on shared webhosts way back in the way - plus Drupal and WordPress being PHP projects.

But to me, one of the most significant advantages PHP has is that its documentation is terrific. PHP.net is simple, clear about parameters and return values (as clear as PHP lets it be anyways) and best of all has a terrific comments / examples section for each function.

Better documented is better.

[pushpop]

Things may have changed since v7 but historically I’ve not found PHPs documentation any better than any other language.

In fact I remember a few occasions where I’ve ended up going by the advice of the comments rather than the documentation itself because the documentation was either out dated or just plain wrong.

[chiefalchemist]

Perhaps not better, but there certainly have been worse.

As for the comments. Yes. But at least they're there, and quite often helpful. Plenty of times I've read other docs where I wished they had commenting but alas didn't.

[ptx]

The comments are only needed because the documentation is often wrong or confused. And, of course, usually most of the comments are wrong too.

Other languages don't need comments because they at least aim to have documentation that's correct.

[chx]

If you find the documentation wrong or confused please let us know. https://bugs.php.net/ We do our best. I was granted access some ten years ago and whenever I find a confusing page I fix it. I know there has been terrible pieces before but for the last oh five or six years I don't really find anything too bad. Please let us know what you found wrong. Thanks!

[ptx]

I was mostly responding to the idea in an ancestor comment that PHP has unusually good documentation (better than that of other languages), "best of all" having comments.

I'm sure the PHP documentation is getting better all the time! Other languages also have good documentation, though. And as pushpop said in an earlier comment, the reason that the comments were useful historically is that the documentation was not always correct or complete. (Perhaps in part because the the language used to have a lot more unintended quirks?)

[welly]

"Often wrong"? Really? By often, 50% more wrong than right or less? Or more? I can count on one hand the number of occasions I've found the documentation to be incorrect.

[pushpop]

"Often" is a fuzzy term and it's used subjectively here. It doesn't mean "most of the documentation" (which would be the >50% goal post you're driving at). It simply means "a lot of the time $OP checks the docs". It might be the case that the only time they need to check the docs is for some of the more advanced features of PHP where errors are more likely to be found in the docs. While you could correctly argue "selection bias", it doesn't still take away from the OPs perspective that it often happens to him.

[chiefalchemist]

I don't see it that way. The comments are there to prevent others from re-inventing the wheel, to share insights, etc. Yes, sometimes that also highlights a "bug" or some other "flaw" but that's the rare exception.

Maybe it would help if you listed some links to language docs that you feel the rest should use as benchmarks?

[conradfr]

That has not been my experience but anyway there's a "Report a Bug" link on every doc page.

[pushpop]

That hasn’t always been there. Or of it has, then the maintainers haven’t ever done anything with bug reports because there have been errors in the docs for the entire life of 5.x.

I don’t really recall earlier versions of PHP being any better either. So I really don’t think PHP became popular because of the docs.

The other comments about how it was easy to learn and easy to deploy is far more accurate. If I recall correctly, back when PHP gained traction, your main options then were Perl (which understandably confused the hell out of a lot of people), ASP (VBScript / JSScipt and requires Windows NT + IIS so not a popular option) or JSP (Java and at that time was pain to deploy. So not something you’d expect a casual web developer to bother with). So PHP is like BASIC or Raspberry Pi of the 90s web. It was made for one specific job, it didn’t do it perfectly, but it was cheap, easy to learn and just about good enough to get the job done.

[snazz]

Maybe this is true, but by virtue of its popularity and ease of use, PHP has one of the largest selections of tutorials on everything, so that it’s possible to write code by just copy-pasting example snippets.

[pushpop]

Maybe within one very narrowly defined field. However move outside of your typical web services and tutorials take a sharp nosedive.

Really the kind of stuff that is well documented in PHP is the kind of stuff that is well documented in most general purpose languages. They are also the kind of problems that aren’t particularly hard to solve anyway.

But this is a moot point because the reason documentation was discussed was because it was credited as being one of the reasons for PHPs popularity. However tutorials wouldn’t exist if a language wasn’t already popular so your comment doesn’t reinforce the point made by the GP.

[tyingq]

"it almost had a "first mover" advantage in that it happened to be installed alongside CGI-BIN on shared webhosts way back in the way"

That's a good observation. Because the mod_php and mod_perl Apache modules were much faster and lighter weight than CGI-BIN, and pre-installed on shared hosting, both PHP and Perl dominated the early web days.

[luckylion]

When / where was mod_perl ever widespread? Perl was usually provided via CGI, and php was mostly deployed with mod_php back in the day which gave it a great speed advantage, often at the price of security.

[wolco]

When? Before 2000.. php came after PERL. PHP wasn't a serious language was the general though. ASP was seen as that.. or Java/JSP

[luckylion]

I know that Perl was earlier, I've worked with Perl before PHP came around. However, I've never seen a shared hosting environment that offered mod_perl, they were all using CGI.

Might be region specific, I've mostly worked in Western Europe, but even the two NA-based providers I've used back then didn't offer mod_perl for shared hosting.

You could certainly get it on a managed server, or set it up yourself on your dedicated box, but PHP's strong suit was the low-end shared hosting options. It ran anywhere, and usually fast.

[cutler]

Not sure about lighter. Mod-perl at least was quite RAM-hungry if I remember.

[tyingq]

Lighter than original CGI-BIN, fork() and exec() for every request.

[cutler]

Faster, yes, but not lighter on RAM usage.

[segmondy]

Nah, PHP survived because it wasn't strict, it tolerated a lot of crap. It would process almost anything it can and not fail. Most other languages would error out seriously. Also it's model of running each request as a fresh process eliminated persistent bugs. PHP's documentation is garbage. I say this as someone that has made money handsomely from PHP. :-).

[stephenr]

> PHP's documentation is garbage

Birds are Cats.

See, we can all make unsubstantiated claims.

[welly]

Why do you say PHP's documentation is garbage?

Just one reason is enough. I personally disagree, I think it's great.

[geitir]

I learned to program through php and the documentation was a major part of that before the prevalence of stack overflow etc

[clairity]

the very first first mover advantage was that php was the free alternative to asp, jsp, and coldfusion. all of these languages were built around the simple premise that web devs wanted to inject code into html, which is the way beginners tended to think about coding.

asp locked you into microsoft, jsp was laden with heavy/expensive java app servers and semantics, and coldfusion was a paid product (and eventually locked you into macromedia/adobe).

i think that if coldfusion had the same free+paid model as php, it would have taken the place of php in web history. despite its faults (maintenance and performance, for example), it was easier and faster to learn and matched the mental model of beginners, just like html itself.

[kazinator]

PHP started in 1994 and was released in 1995. It was the alernative to writing C code inside the web server (like CERN's httpd) and recompiling the server, or doing everything via CGI. (Yes, hacking servers was a thing. In 1994 I worked on a project in which I did exactly that. This was before Apache and modules.)

ASP 1.0 was released in 1996. The first Cold Fusion in 1995. JSP not until 1998.

Cold Fusion and PHP appear to be neck-and-neck, almost; it's plausible that if Cold Fusion had been free, it might have taken more mind share away from PHP.

Interpolating results into HTML dynamically isn't an idea that originated with any of this software. Prior art is the shell "here document", also implemented by imitation in Perl and other languages. "Here documents" were used in CGI scripting before PHP. (I'm not saying that the shell's "here document" is the ultimate prior art, either).

At your system prompt:

  $ cat <<!
  <table>
  $(for x in 1 2 3; do echo "  <tr><td>$x</td></tr>" ; done)
  </table>
  !

  <table>
    <tr><td>1</td></tr>
    <tr><td>2</td></tr>
    <tr><td>3</td></tr>
  </table>

[chessturk]

> Better documented is better.

I was talking to some kid who wanted to be a developer, and I echoed this sentiment. A complex tool with good documentation is easier to use than a simple tool with bad documentation.

[igi3ql]

I haven't found PHP documentation to be better or worse than the documentation of other languages I've used.

What I dislike about it is the comments that every page includes. Most of them are very poorly written snippets of code from 15 years ago.

If you dislike those comments too, consider adding this to your ad blocker:

    php.net###usernotes

[cubano]

I've actually found many of the comments rather useful over the years, and although I'm not crazy on how old and random they often are, I find them at least worth a quick look.

[wwweston]

I've also found that the comments sometimes have very useful notes.

There is the issue of bad advice, but recently I've noticed that there seems to have been a voting system introduced at some point (not sure how long that's been there, I was away from PHP for a good chunk of the last decade), and I think the moderation system is older, so in theory, some of the worst advice should be filtered down/out and some of the best should be filtered up.

[glennpratt]

Seriously? On the spectrum of things worth ad blocking, this would never even hit my radar.

[igi3ql]

I use uBlock Origin and its :style() feature to remove and modify parts of websites that I don't like.

I don't block user comments on PHP doc pages out of spite, I do it because they are very long, making it harder to scroll vertically on the actual documentation.

[glennpratt]

How does comments at the bottom make scrolling harder?

[JauntyHatAngle]

Not OP, but for me (as a potential example) there are websites that I want to scroll up and down on to view different things, but when you scroll down far enough websites have an annoying habit of auto-opening the comments at the bottom, suddenly tripling (or more) the length of the page, making me lose my spot on the page (potentially) and also making it harder to scroll with precision and/or need to scroll through all this new content I didn't want.

Its a minor quibble on desktop, but on mobile its a really annoying feature because I have to manually scroll with my finger for an age.

[Moru]

Doesn't your browser scroll much faster when you swipe twice in quick succession? I mean while the scrolling is going on, you swipe again and in worst case a third time. I never need to swipe more than three times unless the page is gigantic.

[kyriakos]

fortunately the date the comment was posted is very prominent on the page