This article is totally barking up the wrong tree. PHP's growth had little to do with its appeal to programmers, and lots to do with its appeal to shared hosting providers. Safe mode is what I'm talking about.
It enabled me to write multiple hugely successful websites that make me enough money for me, so I can do whatever I want. For the rest of my life.
I really love Linux, Apache and MySql. So doing things in LAMP is just great for me.
Hosting is a big part of my business, so yeah - its cool that PHP is all around. You can get new servers for no money in seconds.
Its a wonderful world. Im so happy, there is LAMP. I never used Perl, Ruby, Lisp or Arc. So I cannot say anything about these. I can only say I dont miss a thing with LAMP. I have a LOT of complaints about HTML and Javascript. I hated using Microsoft stuff. LAMP was the breaktrhough.
Very interesting. Please elaborate!
So I believe icode, personally. My feelings are "good for him" and "I hope he enjoys his steak and strippers".
I'm just making a personal choice to give icode the benefit of the doubt. If he's uneasy about broadcasting his difficult struggle to tens of thousands of people, then that's entirely his personal choice, and I'm happy he was willing to share few details about his experience.
The author says that compared to programming desktop applications (all of the languages he mentioned), the web based stack of MySQL, PHP, and Linux better allowed him to create apps that users wanted.
Developers who started with PHP and moved up to Ruby and Python may not realize that older developers who started with Assembler, Basic, and C++ find any kind of web development a huge improvement for them. And, a productive single person would by definition try to extend and improve their app instead of learning new languages unnecessarily every 6 months.
I don't understand though, why PHP is being compared to JS, when they solve different problems.
As for the language (you mention moving "up" to Ruby or Python), I dont really care if I do
str_replace('stuff','zen','stuff and the art not to care');
'stuff and the art not to care'.kickasstransform('stuff','zen');
When it comes to things that matter, I dont miss anything in PHP. For example, Javascript is a cooler language, because it has first class functions and all that crazy shit. Ok, I dont mind that. But on the other hand, I HATE with a passion that "a=7" will by default put "a" into the global scope in Javascript. That outweights all the advanced tech in Javascript.
But the language itself is not the most important factor. Most important is all the stuff that surrounds it. When I use PHP, I get new servers within a click with any company i choose. I get the LAMP stack installed by putting an Ubuntu CD into any machine, install it and do "apt-get install php5". On IRC, there are tons of people on freenode#php (there aint many for Ruby for example). And there is a very nice manual at php.net and so on.
And VERY important to me is the whole feeling about how L,A,M and P are implemented. How I can use php on the command line, how I can start mysql from the command line and give it commandlineparameters, how one table is represented in MySql (one file for the structure, one file for the data and one for the indexes), how a database is represented in MySql (a directory)... There are millions of things I like. And they make me feel that the people who wrote L,A,M and P at least partly think like me. Thats cool and makes me productive.
mod_perl was a far superior solution, and you didn't have to restart Apache every time. However, this was not the default configuration, which is apparently enough to deter decently smart people.
I don't think its technical merits (such as they are), community, documentation, or appeal to hosting providers is to blame. I think the answer is rather simpler: PHP was the only language that tied itself to the "build a website" niche in both its implementation and its marketing. Sun's contemporary efforts with Java were scattered and, even in the web domain, more focused on applets. PHP had "build a website" written all over it.
In short, I think it comes down to the old adage: location, location, location. PHP was perfectly positioned. The web boomed, and PHP rode its coattails. Anything with even the slimmest virtues could have succeeded with such good placement. In fact, it did.
I would characterize it as this: PHP is a Perl-like language that is entirely web oriented.
Because Rasmus built PHP to make web sites it was oriented towards the web from day 1. Since it's similar to Perl (dynamic typing, just-in-time, etc) it's easy to learn and flexible.
However, unlike Perl there was no existing community with a non web focus. This made it very easy for the PHP community to rally around web projects and achieve all the things that made it good for the web and hence extremely adoptable.