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@Tweenk said:PS 2 Why most major CMSes are written in PHP then? Why is Perl sometimes considered an esoteric language?
Two reasons. First. Critical mass... it's easy, it's approachable, you can get a hosting account quickly, it was marketed well. So, if you have more people writing in a given space with a given language, you'll have more people attempting to solve the same problem.
Second, I'm not all that conviced that most of the PHP developers I've seen actually care about reuse. I realize this is an extremely broad brush, but I've seen more often than not where someone will go off and start writing simple one-off logging implementations that turns into a convoluted mess when they could have just as easily used log4php. So, you end up with CMS solutions that just start as a fork of an existing open source solution, which causes a massive proliferation of something like CMS.
Also, the most major CMS I know of, Interwoven CMS, was written in Perl. Having worked with their platform, I wouldn't exactly hold them up as an example of how to build a system, but they are in the magic quadrant with Gartner and definately have market share.
Any question about why a given language is better than another is sort of stupid. As is questioning why any language has more market share or is considered esoteric. Popularity can be a function of clever marketing, barrier to entry, feature set or any combination... most popular can, at best, mean best for a specific problem domain.
If you follow Paul Graham at all, you'd know that his idea of a perfect language is one they wrote for ViaWeb that was a specialized DSL on top of a specialized version of Scheme. Surely, you'd be of the opinion that Scheme is esoteric, but, for at least one other person, it's the epitome of a great language.