This is truer than you know, but for the wrong reasons.
I worked tech support for a shell provider in the 90s and I helped a LOT of users work through the mechanics of setting up a cgi-bin. One of the most difficult concepts for users without a technical background was file permissions -- specifically the execute bit.
I believe PHP's ease of use primarily stems from what most would consider a security vulnerability: mod_php instructs apache to execute code from php files without the execute bit set. This is inherently the same sort of issue behind email worms on Windows -- exec handlers which pass code to an interpreter without honoring the lack of execute permissions.
It's a terrible idea, and also widely popular. I have personally seen users switch from Perl to PHP purely because they could not figure out how to set the execute bit in their Windows FTP program.
I worked tech support for a shell provider in the 90s and I helped a LOT of users work through the mechanics of setting up a cgi-bin. One of the most difficult concepts for users without a technical background was file permissions -- specifically the execute bit.
I believe PHP's ease of use primarily stems from what most would consider a security vulnerability: mod_php instructs apache to execute code from php files without the execute bit set. This is inherently the same sort of issue behind email worms on Windows -- exec handlers which pass code to an interpreter without honoring the lack of execute permissions.
It's a terrible idea, and also widely popular. I have personally seen users switch from Perl to PHP purely because they could not figure out how to set the execute bit in their Windows FTP program.
The rest is inertia, as far as I'm concerned.