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PHP was pushed by the LAMP platform and that was pretty much the only language to make dynamic web sites in the 1990s and onto the 2000s. (The alternative would
by user5994461 6y ago
PHP was pushed by the LAMP platform and that was pretty much the only language to make dynamic web sites in the 1990s and onto the 2000s. (The alternative would be CGI scripts if I remember well?)
Ruby only has some popularity in the silicon valley. Never heard of companies really adopting Ruby outside of there. It's open to debate whether it can qualify as one of the popular languages.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoPHP was popular before LAMP came along, if anything LAMP came about because PHP was so common. Early on its key feature was easy hosting, there were a lot of shared host sites where using anything other than PHP or maybe a bit of Perl was difficult.
- alexhutcheson 6y agoYou could describe PHP as the primary interface to Apache. It would be straining the the metaphor a bit, but I'd say it's still a reasonable way to explain PHP's popularity. mod_php enabled shared hosting with reasonable performance. If mod_perl had been usable in an untrusted shared environment, then PHP might never have taken off the way it did.
- ken 6y agoRuby is definitely big in Seattle -- I would say bigger than Python or PHP, but that could just be my circles. In the language popularity lists I've seen, it's typically in the #11-15 slot, which is not too shabby. The "LAMP platform" is defined by the set of people using PHP/Perl, so I wouldn't call it "pushed" by that. It's not the native platform of Linux, Apache, MySQL, or the web, and there wasn't exactly any big company pushing it (Facebook famously uses it but it had already cemented its popularity by then).