php - so ubiquitous. It's everywhere. But most experts say it was poorly designed.
python, ruby are supposedly better designed than php but in popularity, php just leads.

lisp - light years ahead of so many languages of its time yet, it never became popular?
Went nowhere in the mainstream, despite efforts by many fans to popularise it

oop - inferior to functional programming , by the experts, yet it dominated the industry.


scala, clojure - i cant seem to find anything negative said of this languages online
yet, the've not chipped a dent in the popularity of the language
they were supposed to steal mindshare from-java.

c++ - one confusing bloated, overcomplex language that is hard to learn and almost impossible to master-
this language dominated the 80s and 90s and still dominates certain industries!
C - same as c++.

Perl - a language with no set principle on how to get things done. There's more than one (obscure) way to do anything. This language dominated the web scene for many years until a brainchild, with the same philosophy was born - php. Php followed in perl's footsteps of being inconsistent.

Php followed in perl's footsteps of being inconsistent.
This part is so funny. In other words, things that are more criticised gain more popularity.
Such is life.

In a way i still believe that PERL was still somewhat more organized than PHP (and more consistent), i might be wrong sha.

*C++ Evangelist passing bye*

Jack of trade . . .

PHP is simple to learn (compared to other languages) and because of that many people started using it and sharing their work online. Today PHP has greatly evolved and PHP6 and PHP 7 are quite different from PHP4. It's more modern, OOP, with better performance but it's still easy to master and that's the key to it's success. Facebook runs on their built of PHP so if it's good for them I guess it can't be bad choice for many other. You just have to be careful since badly written code can create issues problems: security issues, performance issues or it will be hard to maintain or reuse. This is where php frameworks kick in and today it's recommended that you develop using a PHP Framework (CodeIgniter, YII, CakePHP, Laravel...)

PHP as a poorly designed language doesn't mean it is worst!

You probably have many functions/constructs doing similar things die/exit, strcasecmp/strcmp/==, echo/print/printf/sprintf/ blablabla...

Like the poster above said, php frameworks has helped encapsulate all these with their own functions so it looks more organised and presentable. Through the frameworks, better programs are built buy who says the framework isn't built on top of php itself?

So it boils down to the developer in person, your strong use of the language, knowing how the Zend engine works and rest

asalimpo:
php - so ubiquitous. It's everywhere. But most experts say it was poorly designed.
python, ruby are supposedly better designed than php but in popularity, php just leads.

lisp - light years ahead of so many languages of its time yet, it never became popular?
Went nowhere in the mainstream, despite efforts by many fans to popularise it

oop - inferior to functional programming , by the experts, yet it dominated the industry.


scala, clojure - i cant seem to find anything negative said of this languages online
yet, the've not chipped a dent in the popularity of the language
they were supposed to steal mindshare from-java.

c++ - one confusing bloated, overcomplex language that is hard to learn and almost impossible to master-
this language dominated the 80s and 90s and still dominates certain industries!
C - same as c++.

Perl - a language with no set principle on how to get things done. There's more than one (obscure) way to do anything. This language dominated the web scene for many years until a brainchild, with the same philosophy was born - php. Php followed in perl's footsteps of being inconsistent.

PHP codebase might be larger (mostly due to legacy code), but it is definitely not more popular than python.
I bet if PHP wasn't improving its syntax and consistencies, ppl will just drop it for better alternatives. PHP7 introduced more consistencies to the language.
Apart from C++ which is a truly complicated language and still used in niche areas like game dev, I don't see how worst is better.