Adam Trachtenburg has a new posting on his blog with a few thoughts on PHP and Tim Bray and the 80/20 Rule.

I'm listening to Tim Bray talk about technology winners and losers over the past decade or two. He's framing it within the context of Web services (REST vs SOAP), but one of his key takeaways is that of all the major predictive factors, the 80/20 rule has the best correlation between existence and success.

Missing from his list is PHP/FI, which should clearly be filed under winners. People always made fun of the simplicity of PHP (no OO, no namespaces, no Unicode support, etc.) However, you can't argue with the growth curve.

That almost mythical point where we've "done 20 percent of the work and are reaping 80 percent of the benefits" does seem to be pretty far out there, but I agree with Adam - PHP should definitely be included in that list. With the simplicity and power that PHP has to offer, surely one could see how it would make it that much easier to get to the "less work/more reward" stage.

I love this quote too: "If we had tried to jump directly to PHP 5 back in the mid 90s, we never would have made it. We would have had our asses kicked by Perl, Java, or both."