On Hiveminds Magazine's site today, there's a new article that asks the question "what makes a web language successful?"

PHP, Classic ASP and ASP.NET, and soon Ruby owe their success to shared web hosting. I honestly believe that shared hosting is more important than being "enterprise ready" when it comes to web development.

Shared hosting is the reason that the internet became an economic force. So why is it that certain parts of the IT world ignore shared hosting and it's needs?

They explain what they mean by noting that Java isn't what shared hosts need, Python isn't quite there yet, and Perl is still a bit more difficult to use in a web environment. They even look at what it would take for these languages to become more "PHP-like" and really get to that next stage of web development popularity.