Please, everyone is supposed to be slagging C++ (and me), here. I'm sure there will be rich opportunities to dis PHP, in other threads.

You are right, my apologies. It was just so surprising a mention I couldn't stop myself.

My experience from 1990 was it was the perfect language to add a bit of server-side logic to some raw HTML.

So the niche (for me) was a nice transition from something I understood (HTML) to something new (dynamic webpages).

In that way it is similar to batch files / bash scripts.