| (can't reply to your reply so here goes) I'd argue that PHP came out of the gate with some pretty powerful properties, too. They hit a sweet spot of * Being there at the right time (none of the "good" languages in your book was around or usable for web dev at the time of PHP4 and PHP5 came out) * Being easy to learn - giving beginners quick rewards. * Being powerful enough to do quite a bit more than "simple web pages", as you say. This enabled people to "graduate" from "simple web pages" to "web apps".
In fact, most of the web was built in PHP (Wikipedia, Facebook, Wordpress runs on 50% of all webpages or so, Drupal is incredibly popular, Magento runs loads of webshops, and on and on). This has not happened merely by accident.
I feel it's a bit wrongheaded to suggest otherwise. * Being dead easy to deploy on almost any webhost (Drop files, hit them with their url, be done - almost no other language delivers this even today) In all i feel PHP has moved the web forward tremendously.
In time, itself has evolved as well. It may not have evolved as fast as one would want. It's the C++ of the web era, really. |
"Easy to learn" is not the same as giving beginners quick rewards. Being easy to learn, in reality, would probably result in things like Wordpress not having more holes than a swiss cheese.
"Powerful enough" -- most web frameworks are. Saying that it didn't happen by accident of course depends on how you define accident. Personally I think the only thing PHP has got going for it is the timing and next point:
"Dead easy to deploy" again isn't a property of the language. Saying that "almost no language delivers this" about something that's really up to the service you're using to host your website isn't fair, in that it actually has nothing to do with the language.
I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your closing statements, though.