[louiscyphre]

PHP was in the right place at the right time back in the mid-1990s. It exploited the nascent web and gained a first-starter advantage. In other words, PHP lucked out.

Most languages need some luck to make it to the top. JavaScript lucked out with the explosive growth of SPA, circa 2010. Python lucked out with the explosive growth of data science and machine learning in the past decade.

Ruby lucked out with the Rails framework.

Java and C# were heavily marketed by Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, respectively. Objective-C and Swift were heavily marketed by Apple. Dart and Go were heavily marketed by Google. Rust had Mozilla. Kotlin had JetBrains.