From: Paul Prescod <paul@...>
Date: 2003-05-21T11:10:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is PHP so popular?  What can we learn from the PHP camp?

PHP was designed specifically to solve a problem that a bunch of people 
had at a particular point in time. The language, library, documentation 
and distribution were totally organized around solving that problem. 
Specificity is the best "marketing gimmick" around.

Alas, it is way too late to fight PHP for its niche and you would have 
to fight JSP and ASP at the same time. The trick is to see the next big 
wave coming and ride it. Perl had two: system administration (much 
easier than gluing together awk+sed+grep+sh) and then CGI. Tcl had GUIs 
and Expect. Java had applets in the early days and J2EE today. Lisp had 
AI. Javascript should be obvious...

As purist computer scientists we respect languages like Ruby and Python 
that are not contorted for some particular problem domain. But from a 
marketing point of view it slows their growth dramatically. On the other 
hand, if you bet too strongly on the wrong niche you're screwed. Anyone 
here using CORBAScript? Or Amiga REXX? It is nice to know that languages 
like Python and Ruby will never be wiped out because of platform obscurity.

  Paul Prescod