BS. CGI.pm was part of the Perl core in 1997. And Perl was the language that dominated the dot com boom. The thing that PHP did better than Perl was the abilit

BS. CGI.pm was part of the Perl core in 1997. And Perl was the language that dominated the dot com boom. The thing that PHP did better than Perl was the ability to be set up on shared web hosting. Mind you, it did that mostly by not acknowledging all of the security holes that it had which allowed one user access to what should have been private for another user. But shared hosting providers had a population of people who wanted to use PHP, were forgiving of major security flaws (which PHP had many of), and would pay money. Meanwhile Perl went the route of doing things right, and being much more secure. Which, even though it feels important to good developers, is bad for marketing. It was a classic Worse is Better situation. See https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html if you're not familiar with that concept. And, in the end, the commodity wins. So in the mid-2000s, PHP did catch up and beat Perl.