> Perl could have "won" just the same as ColdFusion, or VBScript.

Perl was far more widespread early on (96-99) than PHP was, but it was quite painful to deal with compared to PHP. PHP made web stuff dead simple, and that's why it 'won'. CF and VBS never really stood a chance because of the extra costs involved. iHTML, HTML/OS and others were all vying for a foot in the door at this stage, but all were second-run players charging money for something that 99% of hosts were never going to pay for, and therefore devs wouldn't get exposed to those tools.

The funny thing is, despite being originally inferior in everything but simplicity compared to Perl, PHP has added feature upon feature (usually poorly thought-tout) over the years, and nowadays looks like a poorly-designed Perl with a terrible standard library.

And an absolutely enormous installed base as well as a huge amount of code available for use. It's funny how it succeeded so well in spite of being a fairly crappy language.

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.

I suppose the thing is that Perl is a general-purpose programming language that was not really optimized for the Web whereas PHP started out with no ambitions other than being a Web templating language, which made it easier to get started with.