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When all dimensions are considered, the better thing is the thing that wins. All the counter examples in other replies focus on one aspect of a piece of tech t

• regularfry 5y ago
  That is an error in the other direction: focusing only on a single good aspect of a piece of tech. PHP wasn't up against J2EE in that first wave, it displaced perl and cgi-bin. And the only thing it had going for it was easier deployment. Arguably first-class templating too, but I don't think that was the killer feature, and really perl wasn't that far behind. Perl had better OS support, a massive ecosystem that PHP didn't catch up with for about 15 years, and a community that actually cared about code quality. And it was renowned as a "getting stuff done" high-productivity language. The easier deployment story for PHP3 meant you saw massive expansion at the bottom of the market as cheap webhosts were able to offer very locked-down accounts for peanuts, which meant a generation of developers came along whose only experience was with PHP. They didn't have anything to compare to and nobody was really offering them anything else at anything like the same scale. The virtualisation revolution hadn't happened yet, so these were all shared accounts on physical boxes, and they couldn't install their own stuff either. It's just not reasonable to say PHP was "better" except in a very limited, and largely accidental sense. It just so happened that that one advantage was enough to catapult it into first place.