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* Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> [2006-12-26 13:45]:
> As far as I can tell one of the reasons PHP won was because it
> had a really sucky half-assed web security model that made PHP
> applications no more secure than anything else, but made people
> think that because it paid lip service to web security it was
> actually doing something for them. So they could avoid thinking
> about it.
You mean the fact that it clones the CGI execution model? (Ie.
every request served starts with a blank slate in program state.)
Yeah, that is one factor, which makes it easy to offer on shared
web hosting.
There are a bunch of other factors, such as that it's reasonably
fast when compared to CGI; that the language comes with
everything and the kitchen sink in terms of libraries, built
right into the core, and makes setting up all that stuff the
sysadmin's job; that the language doesn't care a bit about
running outside a webserver so it avoids the file executable
permission difficulties that plague people who just want to set
up someone else's PHP app on their site; etc.
All together it's a perfect storm of factors leading to an
impressive demonstration of Elaine's Law:
Just make it fucking easy to install, stupid!
It's easy for webhost admins to install and trivial for every
Tom, Dick and Harry to deploy code for. (Or at least, it appears
to be an easy platform to deploy to; in reality, the host's
particular settings in php.ini have pretty dramatic effects, and
each installation may or may not include the parts of the PHP
"core" library that you need. But let's not allow reality to
intrude upon the common perception. As long as you don't need any
interesting things, it *is* simple.) And so it won.
It excels only along a single axis, but that was enough to cancel
out its unfathomable hatefulness along every other.
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>;
There's stuff above here
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