> Then PHP came along and made things a great deal easier because managing a server was hard, and PHP just worked pretty much everywhere. In that sense PHP was

> Then PHP came along and made things a great deal easier because managing a server was hard, and PHP just worked pretty much everywhere. In that sense PHP was amazing. This. My first web programming was in Perl [1], and using PHP was much simpler to get into. You just uploaded it and it worked. I think the biggest problem with PHP was it was a hammer and everything looked like a nail. That created a lot of spaghetti code. [1] I still have a soft spot in my heart for Perl. I don't think it was an issue of "PHP is better than Perl", just that PHP was easier/faster.