in reply to (OT) Revisionist History Lesson

Perl could have prevented this mess by 1) bundling a tweaked mod_perl and 2) adding more core modules; because on the original wiki CPAN was selling point #1 AGAINST Perl (after 3 kudos):
"PHP, unlike ASP and Perl, has some of the largest free and open-source libaries included with the core build."

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PHP&oldid=1255359#PHP%27s_Libraries

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Re^2: (OT) Revisionist History Lesson
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Aug 23, 2019 at 00:29 UTC

    Deployment—plus apps to deploy—was indeed the main reason PHP got ahead. But there were other reasons, largely cultural in my view, and hindsight being 20/20 the issues could have been addressed a few different ways; modperl lite was not—directly anyway—one of them. And the rest… I can't speak to today but 20ish years ago, those core libraries were garbage, some without even tests or any kind of error feedback or debugging at all. And that wiki section is written quite disingenuously, manipulatively. In one breath: Perl doesn't have this stuff included! PHP has stuff like replace! and match! The downlow boasting about the raft of s/key_words/keywordz/ it has is embarrassing. I was shocked when I did a contract that involved a bunch of PHP and had to debug things and saw how bad the included libraries were compared to stuff I was used to like DBI.

    Anyway… PHP is still more fun than Java. :P

      PHP is still more fun than Java. :P

      Yes; but you need to try Scala, if you haven't yet.

      I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

        I have indeed tried Scala. I found it very Perly but slightly more verbose and less DWIM. If there were no Perl, I’d probably gravitate toward it.