Scott Meyers wants to bring default zero-initialization to C++, mentions TDPL for precedent

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 22 November 2015 at 10:58:33 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> comments on topic. You take social factors (getting the 
> momentum, gathering large stable community) and derived 
> beneficial factors (good tooling, good platforms, lot of out of 
> the box solutions) and proceed to use it as a backing argument 
> to mostly technical statement ("PHP (as a language) scales"),

Php started at zero like everyone else. It followed a growth 
pattern like Perl, and did so by accumulating C libraries/APIs 
and making 5 liners productive.

But it was also reasonable effective compared to perl/python and 
it most certainly worked better at the small web scale than the 
alternatives. Working well at the small scale was probably the 
primary reason for Php's success. And being able to scale up to 
hosting many websites on a single server reasonable efficiently 
was also a factor.

So scaling has been a factor for the success of Php, just not the 
big site scaling. Erlang is probably the only language that has 
gained momentum because of the ability to scale upwards.

> One can also say that PHP is easy language to start with which 
> got in right place in right time with good vision. That 
> contribution snowball effect resulted in having very good 
> platform and collective wisdom, as well as solid developer pool.

The dominant factor has probably been that Php has been perceived 
as non-professional and unsuitable for serious business all along.

As a result it become a differentiating factor for hosting. 
Charge a small fee for Php/MySQL aiming at personal sites and 
small businesses, charge a premium for Python/Java/Postgres/MS 
etc. But most people want to save money so they went with Php...

Php might have failed if it had been a good enterprise level 
language, it would have been too attractive to differentiate web 
host pricing.