The Perl community was too unfocused on the web. Perl was, and is, a general-purpose language built as a replacement for sed, awk, and shell scripts and later retrofitted for the web. PHP was built for one task, which gives it a certain coherency that is a major strength, especially for newbs.

You learn to build a web page with embedded PHP on page three of most tutorials. I don't remember the Camel book covering that at all. If it does I didn't notice -- too busy slogging through the regexps and the hash syntax and the insane special characters and the bizarre function-declaration syntax. And I fear that, in Perl, there is no standard way to do it. There are probably 75 standards, which is helpful, but not very helpful.

If I visit any random web forum about PHP I am 97% likely to find a discussion of website development; if I visit a random Perl forum I'm just as likely to find sysadmins debating how to automate database backups, or a linguistics debate, or a game of Perl golf.

Totally. As a total newbie, I picked up a Perl book and got frustrated. Then picked up a PHP/MySQL book and built a few websites.

The biggest thing for me, at the time, was the ease of use of PHP/MySQL. I haven't touched Perl in nearly a decade, perhaps it got better, but even in 2000-2001 PHP made it very easy for a total newbie to build dynamic websites.

> The Perl community was too unfocused on the web.

That's a fairly ridiculous claim. Perl CGI had all the momentum. It had plenty of forums. I repeat: PHP won because as the internet grew and compile-at-run CGI was no longer sufficiently scalable mod_php was more viable than mod_perl or fastcgi.

I think that's a bit true but I also have to believe that from a syntax perspective PHP has always been easier to use. That and all the libraries are pretty much built into php. you never had to deal with CPAN - it was either built into PHP's core or you lived without it (generally).