> The remaining thing keeping PHP so popular is how amazingly ubiquitous it is. A fork wouldn't have that advantage, especially in comparison to languages and environments that are objectively better anyway.
Initially, I believe you are correct, but I am not sure long term. PHP is easy for a system admin to install. Other than perl, I am not sure if there is anything out there that is as easy. I would imagine a fork, if it wants to survive, would need to be just as easy.
I do wonder why PHP has never really had any competition in the "super easy for my system admin" category.
It's not just ease of installation by sysadmins, but ease of use on shared hosting and ease of script installation by non-developers.
I can walk my mother through installation of a PHP script. I can almost walk her through installation of a CGI script in any language, really. But unless that shared host has already set up a Python or Ruby environment (few do; I can count the ones I know on my left hand), I'd never, ever dream of trying to walk her through setting up something in other languages.
Making running scripts as easy as dropping them onto a filesystem would be perhaps the killer feature for other languages to target, if they want to take a bite out of PHP's consumer market share.
Of course, then there's another battle: shared hosting providers. The vast majority are running some sort of third-party control panel software with very opinionated hooks deep into every bit of configuration on the machine. Unless that killer feature can be baked into that software, and unless the shared host actually updates their software, there's no hope.
You wouldn't believe how many shared hosts are running ten+ year old installations of everything, not giving a crap that they're out of date. And hey, that ten year old version of PHP still installed there is still going to work just fine with the majority of scripts...
A lot of things are becoming extremely easy to install though. With the growth of AWS and cloud-services I'd guess there will be movement away over the next 5 years.
I have not seen anything that comes close (other than CGI scripts) from either the system admin side or the client code side. I would love to know if other folks are addressing this. The closest (well, other than Perl) is some of the tooling surrounding Java deployment.
Initially, I believe you are correct, but I am not sure long term. PHP is easy for a system admin to install. Other than perl, I am not sure if there is anything out there that is as easy. I would imagine a fork, if it wants to survive, would need to be just as easy.
I do wonder why PHP has never really had any competition in the "super easy for my system admin" category.