PHP gets so much love and money shoved at it, the Ruby programmer in me finds it unfair.
That being said, I'm really glad that this helps millions of PHP devs around the world so bravo to the people working on this.
That being said, I'm really glad that this helps millions of PHP devs around the world so bravo to the people working on this.
PHP was the "right tool" in that it was the language Zuck knew when it was a one-man project. And facebook's success is a reminder that second-tier technologies can be perfectly adequate to build a successful business on, that business concerns often have a lot more impact than technical ones. It shouldn't be taken as an indication that all their technical decisions were right.
Popular has little to do with fair, and a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.
And network effects mean that being popular can make something desirable for some uses even when its intrinsic features aren't superior. And, anyway, while Ruby may sometimes lose to PHP for this reasons, it (due to Rails) often benefits from this, too.