[mseebach]

PHP was never good, but it abstracted away some basic web specifics -- as opposed to CGI/Perl that required you to care about protocol details such as starting output with two newlines -- and hit a sweet spot infrastructurewise -- dead easy to get started with, dead easy to get hosted for next to nothing -- that gave it enough traction to grow very quickly.

[fallous]

I'm not sure that was so much the attraction when PHP first started gaining traction given the existence of CGI.pm

From my experience in the 90s, most of the early adopters of PHP were more smitten with included PHP code in otherwise static HTML files. It was SSI++