I agree with this. Deployment of Perl was a pain in the ass. With PHP you literally just FTP’d the files to your normal web directory and you were off to the races.
Even today PHP still has that advantage over many other languages. To my knowledge even now you can’t just upload a bundle of .py, .rb or .jar files into a directory hosted by Apache and go.
That being said these days the other languages become their own http server and are usually fronted by a reverse proxy or two. But still that is like an order of magnitude harder to stand up than PHP.
Even today PHP still has that advantage over many other languages. To my knowledge even now you can’t just upload a bundle of .py, .rb or .jar files into a directory hosted by Apache and go.
That being said these days the other languages become their own http server and are usually fronted by a reverse proxy or two. But still that is like an order of magnitude harder to stand up than PHP.