Comment by contingencies
2 days ago
perl5 -> php3 here. I'd say PHP won for the following reasons: 1. Easier to set up. 2. More homogeneous environment which meant easier deployment across the hosts of the day. 3. More secure (a bit). 4. Unicode actually worked. 5. Far more logical syntax: did not have to man perldsc[0] every time you wanted a data structure of greater depth than a monodimensional hash or array. 6. Language features like scalars which made programming easier. 7. Often less files... it was designed to be embedded inside of HTML instead of generating it.
I made the switch from Perl to php mostly because php executed a lot faster (without having to figure out any weird stuff like modperl) and I loved the little convenience functions just built-in like “strtoupper” and the date formatting stuff!