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Wordpress succeeded because they were using PHP, because during the 2000's it was very easy to find a cheap shared hosting solution in PHP+MySQL. There was no c
by eloisant 10y ago
Wordpress succeeded because they were using PHP, because during the 2000's it was very easy to find a cheap shared hosting solution in PHP+MySQL. There was no cheap way to host Rails applications.
And their target was people who would install Wordpress themselves on a cheap shared host.
Facebook and Wikipedia probably used PHP because many developers knew it, and the reason was... That there was many cheap shared hosting solution for their pet projects.
Not only this is no longer true (it's just as easy and cheap to host Rails, Java, Scala, or anything with cloud hosting), but the availability of cheap shared hosting is not relevant for most problems.
tl;dr:
* Wordpress couldn't have succeeded without PHP, because of a context that is no longer true today
* Facebook succeeded despite using PHP, because they had the manpower to fork the language and write their own VM
- davidgerard 10y agoThe reason Wikipedia - or, rather, MediaWiki - uses PHP is because Magnus Manske was going to write something to replace UseMod, and thought he'd try this "PHP" thing he'd heard of. It was his first PHP project. (And why didn't Wikipedia have a visual editor until 2013, rather than 2005? Because wikitext syntax was literally defined as "whatever this series of PHP regexps does". Of small acorns, mighty oaks of technical debt can grow ...) Anyone who claims anything even vaguely in the direction of "PHP is good 'cos Wikipedia uses it" is talking rubbish.