Why PHP won

When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. But by the time I was building my first websites for commercial use, PHP had taken over. Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Through my platform choices, I have forced many people to learn PHP and to work with

[rawwell]

"It's easy to forget that these decisions need to be made, not on a language-by-language basis, but on a platform-by-platform basis. PHP may not be a great language, but the platform it enables does attract one particular kind of great developer: the cutting edge web gurus who work primarily in java