It's not just a question about the software engineering benefits of PHP (or of Wordpress) but also about deploy-ability.
When I started programming CGI scripts in Perl it was unusual for a web server to be configured to let just anybody write CGI scripts because it was easy to hose a web server or a whole machine with CGI scripts. CGI scripts had a highly inefficient execution model, and no resource limits to prevent CPU and memory overages from bringing the server down.
Now, in principle, mod_perl is better, but practically, a mod_perl installation is rocket science. I saw more than one organization with a crumbling system written in Perl reject mod_perl, because their existing code base wouldn't work correctly in it and because they didn't have faith that they could work all the problems out.
PHP, on the other hand, put a trouble-free installation and deployment experience first, rather than last. PHP might be a crappy language, but an absolute idiot can build a very reliable web server that performs acceptably with no effort. Python, Java, Ruby and other languages are superior in many ways, but they've spent years hacking together deployment answers (with various levels of success) as an afterthought, whereas PHP had performance, reliability and simple deployment baked in from day one.
When I started programming CGI scripts in Perl it was unusual for a web server to be configured to let just anybody write CGI scripts because it was easy to hose a web server or a whole machine with CGI scripts. CGI scripts had a highly inefficient execution model, and no resource limits to prevent CPU and memory overages from bringing the server down.
Now, in principle, mod_perl is better, but practically, a mod_perl installation is rocket science. I saw more than one organization with a crumbling system written in Perl reject mod_perl, because their existing code base wouldn't work correctly in it and because they didn't have faith that they could work all the problems out.
PHP, on the other hand, put a trouble-free installation and deployment experience first, rather than last. PHP might be a crappy language, but an absolute idiot can build a very reliable web server that performs acceptably with no effort. Python, Java, Ruby and other languages are superior in many ways, but they've spent years hacking together deployment answers (with various levels of success) as an afterthought, whereas PHP had performance, reliability and simple deployment baked in from day one.