> Sure, but there's nothing inherent to the language that fueled that. They could have done that with Python, for example.
Not quite true. With shared hosting it was (is?) uncommon for a user directory to have ExecCGI enabled. If you wanted scripts to run they had to live in the cgi-bin directory. Additionally mod_rewrite could be expensive on low powered servers. This all meant doing anything dynamic meant "ugly" URLs and meta tag forwards if you were on such a shared host. It was also non-trivial amounts of effort to get some random CGI script working since you needed to know enough to get the shebang path correct for the server and set the right permissions.
Contrast this to PHP where you dropped a .php file into your user directory and you've got some dynamic content. Platforms built on PHP became popular because you could upload them to your user folder and they just sort of worked. There were no special executable paths, no shebangs, and no execute permissions to set.
Perl was huge in the CGI space for a long time but the (consumer) content platforms built on it weren't nearly as successful because of the difficulty of mere mortals getting them running on their shared hosting plans.
Not quite true. With shared hosting it was (is?) uncommon for a user directory to have ExecCGI enabled. If you wanted scripts to run they had to live in the cgi-bin directory. Additionally mod_rewrite could be expensive on low powered servers. This all meant doing anything dynamic meant "ugly" URLs and meta tag forwards if you were on such a shared host. It was also non-trivial amounts of effort to get some random CGI script working since you needed to know enough to get the shebang path correct for the server and set the right permissions.
Contrast this to PHP where you dropped a .php file into your user directory and you've got some dynamic content. Platforms built on PHP became popular because you could upload them to your user folder and they just sort of worked. There were no special executable paths, no shebangs, and no execute permissions to set.
Perl was huge in the CGI space for a long time but the (consumer) content platforms built on it weren't nearly as successful because of the difficulty of mere mortals getting them running on their shared hosting plans.