[Shish2k]

In my personal experience of being around back then, postgres and python were still considered "technically better", but such a massive pain in the ass to install (especially on cheap shared hosting where it was often actually impossible to install) that only the most masochistic people would even try. I myself wrote a fastcgi implementation in PHP which would allow a web server which only supported php to call python under the hood and forward the inputs and outputs :P

It is kind of depressing that 25 years later, no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP in the “easy to get started on bargain-basement-tier shared web hosts” space D:

[dagw]

no other language has even attempted to compete with PHP

PHP has been very good at reinventing itself and being its own biggest competitor. Zend outcompeted PHP3, PHP5 outcompeted PHP4, PHP7 outcompeted PHP5 and so on. Compare a site written in modern idiomatic PHP8 using something like Laravel to a site written in classic PHP3 and they might as well be two different languages.

[The_Colonel]

IIRC the big break was betweem PHP 4 and PHP 5, they had very different object model. Otherwise the it's not that different.