It really illustrates how useful a quick way to get started with the language is. PHP could provide something useful to the author and others (web content) almost immediately, while Perl required you to understand CGI (to some degree) first. In some respects, PHP's lack of features was beneficial, as each missing feature was something people didn't have to learn about, even if tangentially. No packages or namespaces? A poor module ecosystem develops, but devs didn't need to think about how it worked for the most part.