&gt; * <i>The nature of the early adopter individuals and companies (thought experiment: young Mark Zuckerberg sits down one night and proceeds to write thefacebook v0.0.0.0.1 in Perl, not PHP)</i><p>A couple of points:<p>01) PHP was already very well established when Zuckerberg wrote thefacebook. As was Perl, Python, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, and a few Java solutions (such as Tomcat) too. While it feels like Facebook has been around since forever, it&#x27;s actually quite a recent development relative to the age of the web. My point being that it wasn&#x27;t Facebook that made PHP big.<p>10) You theorise about what might have happened if early prototypes of thefacebook written in Perl but that was actually the original language Zuckerberg favoured (eg  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;philfreo&#x2F;7257723" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;philfreo&#x2F;7257723</a>).