Ground Breaking Languages

I actually think that PHP, like Basic, was simple enough for the Everyone to grasp, and came with a good-enough standard library (always important). But I think what made it the swiss-army knife of web developers is that it was deployed _everywhere_.

One cannot login to [hosting provider du jour] and run Lisp, and let's not even discuss the devops horrors of trying to get a JVM to run on a server, let alone one shared by 50 of your closest friends. But you can edit index.php in notepad, ftp it to your hosting provider, and voilà: you have created your first dynamic content on the web.

I thought perhaps there might be some chicken-and-egg at work here, that if Wordpress had been written in Python (for example) that shared Python installs would be the default. But I realized that Python is a software engineering language. It has structure and enforces its use. But PHP allows, for good or bad, one to use whatever kind of crazy syntax style they like, in just about any filename they want, and it's likely still going to parse. In that way, it is very Perlish. But unlike Perl, normal folks can read it, which fosters a copy-paste-and-improve development cycle.

I do not, in any seriousness, understand why Facebook uses PHP; hell, uses? Built a damn compiler for it. But if I recall correctly, the answer at the time was "it works for us," which is all the justification that the outside world needs, I guess.