[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>