Actually is not just about easiness, rather than safeness.
PHP historically did not come with a disposable webserver, and writing one was hard. All the focus was on stateless applications. So while the smart guys were dealing with the memory leaks of their wonderful engineered systems, PHP monkeys were able to get things done with almost no fear to bring down the server.
I remember reading that Aaron Swartz used to go to bed with his laptop in order to be able to quickly restore Reddit in the case it crashed during the night. [Citation needed]
For hosting companies of the time, the choice of the language was pretty obvious. Most of them have policies of automatically killing long-running processes even nowadays.
PHP historically did not come with a disposable webserver, and writing one was hard. All the focus was on stateless applications. So while the smart guys were dealing with the memory leaks of their wonderful engineered systems, PHP monkeys were able to get things done with almost no fear to bring down the server.
I remember reading that Aaron Swartz used to go to bed with his laptop in order to be able to quickly restore Reddit in the case it crashed during the night. [Citation needed]
For hosting companies of the time, the choice of the language was pretty obvious. Most of them have policies of automatically killing long-running processes even nowadays.