Language · 1995–now · Web Boom
PHP
Dismissed by snobs, powering WordPress and half the web. Ugly pragmatism beats elegant irrelevance.
PHP stuck because shared hosting and copy-paste tutorials beat compiler toolchain purity for small businesses. WordPress turned it into an economy. Snobs hate it; the web runs on it anyway.
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Architecture · 1998–now
LAMP
Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — the cheap, fast path to a website. Mutated into countless managed stacks.
Framework · 2004–now
Ruby on Rails
Convention over configuration. Taught a decade of frameworks how to ship MVPs — and how to hit scaling walls.
Language · 1987–2010
Perl
The duct tape of the early web and sysadmin era. Regex culture in a language that read like line noise.