PHP historically had the advantage of being really easy to program for with limited knowledge, while still being powerful enough to let you evolve from small ho

PHP historically had the advantage of being really easy to program for with limited knowledge, while still being powerful enough to let you evolve from small hobby projects to big enterprise web apps. Python and Ruby became popular for similar reasons, but they were harder to host, so PHP kept an edge. I would say that today go and node.js have similar programmability advantages, as well as eclipsing PHP performance-wise, but as long as they're not universally available from shared web hosts PHP will have a niche.