RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117485038738893225
i guess many people have memory holed the 2000s but PHP mostly took off because shared hosting with Apache mod_php was the only hosting out there. there literally was No Choice.
(some hosts allowed CGI but the new-process-per-request model with interpreted languages on 00s cheap hardware was super slow, and URL setup was hell)
VPSes appeared later, were much more expensive, and you had to be a sysadmin, and that was the only way to run other languages. Until "PaaS" happened and Heroku was the cool thing.. I remember playing with Google App Engine as a small kid, getting Google to just host my Python 2.7 apps…
(Me, whispering: Maybe the reason PHP is everywhere and in everything is that ease of use, ease of modification and ease of deployment are actually good things and making easy, fun things safe is way, way more important to real world practices and uptake than trying to graft ease of use and fun onto guarantees of safety that computing has never been willing, much less able, to really guarantee anyway.)
@valpackett Apache httpd and PHP were what made it possible to build such shared hosting environments and turn them into a usable product with moderate effort. And it was worth doing it because there was a consumer market.
It's not as if the LAMP mafia pressed everyone into using their tools.