> For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see

> For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see. That's backwards in my opinion. PHP was successful among non-CS-people, and those people started building things they were interested in. That gave PHP the initial success (especially on the web, were plenty of people didn't have a CS background unlike in enterprise software), which lead to people like Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales using PHP to build their first version of Wikipedia. And it also lead to PHP being the go to thing for websites, pushing aside Perl, which meant that when Zuckerberg wanted to build a site for fun to rate coeds, PHP was a natural choice. Quick to build, easy to deploy, not a lot to worry about. I'd be surprised if somebody back then planned to invest a huge sum of money and create some giant system and chose PHP. But PHP just being there, highly available, and people using it for all kinds of random stuff and then some of those things taking off and PHP just remaining at their core because of inertia, that's not surprising imho.