I disagree on what succeeds and how. PHP succeeded in spades and it’s trash. I think it falls to marketing and, like I harp, applications and deployability. Perl, with its multiplicity of syntax and approach has no chance of ever being a favorite of modern academics; though I believe it to be a superior teaching language for its ease of entry, flexibility, and multi-paradigm support.

Never used PHP, can't tell if it's "trash" or if we are treating PHP the way pythonistas are treating us. (Pythonistas probably just stole our propaganda?)

What I know is that PHP has function signatures and an standard OOP system.

But my point was addressing multipliers , PHP wasn't chosen by academics but web-server admins.

Perl is competing simultaneously on different markets with different target audiences.

There is no one fits all strategy.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

I reserved judgement on PHP until I had to use it for a project a few years ago. I couldn't quite believe it was as bad as it was painted. Actually, it was worse. I've heard it has improved, but when I used it there were at least two incompatible regex engines and so many different, incompatible and quirky ways of doing the same thing it almost guarantees any line of code contains a subtle bug.

Pythonistas have a different and valid view of how code should be written ("The one true way") that runs in direct opposition to Perl's TIMTOWTDI. I'm sure Pythonistas would hate PHP where they simply dislike Perl.

Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond