PHP gained dominance by being the only thing that existed in early web days. Alternatives were Perl or C via CGI or PHP via apache that was so easy to learn and use it exploded.

Javascript and ruby didnt come out until after, java came out slightly before i think its forgotten just how old php is. It was designed for programmatically manipulating html pages which was revolutionary and wasnt designed with the modern internet.

Laravel 4/5 breathed new life into the language but its existence is based around intertia, high supply of cheap devs, wordpress. It also dominated the old serverside web which didnt get replaced by anything until around nodejs 4 when the concept for API and client separation became mainstream about 12 ish years ago and everyone became a full stack developer with public facing mongodb instances with the default login.

Source: been a webdev for far too long and the entire stack sucks regardless and the internet should only serve HTML pages as god intended

LAMP + jQuery + minimum wage dev team. Bangin profits

PHP 6

Cake PHP

CODEIGNITER

IIS

Windows server 2003

Relative imports

PHPmyadmin