"Being there at the right time" is pretty much the only redeeming quality it has, and it's not so much a quality of the language, is it?
"Easy to learn" is not the same as giving beginners quick rewards. Being easy to learn, in reality, would probably result in things like Wordpress not having more holes than a swiss cheese.
"Powerful enough" -- most web frameworks are. Saying that it didn't happen by accident of course depends on how you define accident. Personally I think the only thing PHP has got going for it is the timing and next point:
"Dead easy to deploy" again isn't a property of the language. Saying that "almost no language delivers this" about something that's really up to the service you're using to host your website isn't fair, in that it actually has nothing to do with the language.
I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your closing statements, though.
"Easy to learn" is not the same as giving beginners quick rewards. Being easy to learn, in reality, would probably result in things like Wordpress not having more holes than a swiss cheese.
"Powerful enough" -- most web frameworks are. Saying that it didn't happen by accident of course depends on how you define accident. Personally I think the only thing PHP has got going for it is the timing and next point:
"Dead easy to deploy" again isn't a property of the language. Saying that "almost no language delivers this" about something that's really up to the service you're using to host your website isn't fair, in that it actually has nothing to do with the language.
I must say that I wholeheartedly agree with your closing statements, though.