Item — HN Reader

I think that's dismissive. I think the stability of PHP to not change too rapidly has made it very attractive compared to the alternatives, as well as the documentation.

When you look at why JS lost its way it changed too quickly, python changed in a non-backward-compatible way, ruby changed quickly (as did all its packages).

1 comments

> I think that's dismissive. I think the stability of PHP to not change too rapidly has made it very attractive, as well as the documentation.

If that was it, we'd all be writing Perl. Seriously. The documentation is better, the backwards compatibility is second to none, it's well designed (even if it's not what people expect, and people often misinterpret how it works because it's just similar enough to most procedural languages to seem the same). Particularly when compared to PHP (which copied a lot of parts of Perl, but did so poorly), it stands up well.

That said, I think you are half there. It's not just stability and documentation, but that with a minimum level of community, which PHP garnered by being dead easy to deploy back when that was actually a concern and in-language frameworks didn't abound. Perl lost a lot of community in the early 2000's, and never really recovered fully from that (relative to popularity of other languages at least).

> If that was it, we'd all be writing Perl. Seriously. The documentation is better, the backwards compatibility is second to none, it's well designed

but you can learn how to write PHP in junior high school while being drunk at 4 am.

You could learn Perl, or Lisp, too in the same circumstances. Most people won't, though, because they'll pick a "hot" language for their domain of interest.

This is how, in our fashion-driven industry, suboptimal solutions win - they grow off tiny differences in a positive feedback loop.