There is a very interesting talk [By Rasmus Lerdorf ](https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg) on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of PHP.

There is a very interesting talk [By Rasmus Lerdorf ](https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg https://youtu.be/wCZ5TJCBWMg) on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of PHP. He addresses the issue of why PHP not Perl became the "winner" on the web. (About ten minutes into the talk) In his opinion it was due to the Apache modules that build PHP, alternatively a Perl, interpreter into the Apache server PHP's implementation implemented just enough to make it work (document generation hook), while Perl implemented all bells and whistles, including path translation. This made all the Apache hooks available to the Perl programmer. On shared servers using a single Apache server and virtual host with several websites running on one Apache server this meant a Perl programmer could hijack the whole server Hubris