> the performance of a historically technologically poor language like PHP
One of the biggest reasons PHP supplanted Perl as the de facto web programming language ~10 years ago was that Perl running through CGI was incredibly slower than PHP.
Sorry, but that's just historically inaccurate. PHP _10_ years ago was popular because it was a templating language that could be embedded in HTML, in which case it supplanted SSI and really was a competitor to ASP.
mod_perl was spanking PHP 10 years ago from a performance standpoint, but the democratization of the web meant that a lot of people that started with basic HTML layout then learned to extend it with PHP in templates, then moved on from there. Much the same as Perl became a dominant CGI language in mid/late 90s because a lot of sysadmins and hackers transitioned to back-end development due to web programming demands.
No, it's not historically inaccurate. mod_perl was fast, but no shared hosts offered it. So unless you wanted to shell out big bucks for a dedicated server, mod_perl wasn't much of an option. And if you wanted to write software to give away or sell to others, mod_perl certainly wasn't much of an option unless you wanted to only focus on a very small part of the market.
I personally transitioned from writing Perl CGI scripts to writing PHP scripts about (pause while I look through my records) 9 years ago, and it was exclusively for performance reasons (I still prefer Perl as a language). I was not alone in my thinking back then.
> - commenting on docs (cut-and-paste programming ;))
Very true and rarely mentioned. PHP docs never had the fancy wiki/social/javadoc features you see in many languages, just a primitive comments system - and it was perfect.
When you were picking it up back when "PHP3" yielded 0 results in Amazon (and we had to change the oil on our desktops every week) the docs were your bible, not merely in the sense of occasionally contradicted themselves but also in having examples, Q&A and recipes for common tasks posted by your peers in the comments, much faster than doc writers could catch up with the language's growth.
mod_perl required real programming techniques due to the shared namespace. So many cgi scripts were written with no localization and so many programmers of that era had embraced the sloppiness of lack-of-persistence that it was hard to port existing cgi to mod_perl even assuming they bothered to try and grok the "voodoo" of persistence in a single finite process CGI world.
One of the biggest reasons PHP supplanted Perl as the de facto web programming language ~10 years ago was that Perl running through CGI was incredibly slower than PHP.