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