PHP’s Enterprise Strengths and Weaknesses, Take 2
PHP was designed to solve what I (and others, such as PHP’s creator, Rasmus Ledorf) call “The Web Problem,” by which we mean the challenges found in the creation of dynamic server-side applications on the Internet or on an intranet.
PHP was created to–and continues to evolve to–solve this single problem, which perhaps is the biggest reason why it’s been a (if not “the”) Internet programming language of choice for such a long time. In fact, PHP is the fourth most popular programming language in the world, according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, above C++, Perl, Python and Ruby. (In all fairness, this probably represents the reality that more people are writing web applications and are turning to a language designed to solve that problem.)