Then there is the fact that PHP and JavaScript were basically domain specific languages at their inception.
PHP was a hypertext pre-processor. Pearl, but stripped down for templating.
JavaScript was an alternative to Java applets. When you don't need the full power of Java, you could throw in a few small scripts.
To make things a bit less intimidating, the weak typing seemed like a good idea, and for these use-cases it might very well have been. If you don't know how to program and only want to display some fancy styled text, why would you need to understand that a number isn't a string?
But there was the pattern, that "real" programming languages like Java and C/C++ were hard to learn for the average "creator", so they took JS and PHP as entry and built up their skills from there, building bigger and bigger solutions with those tools.
Then there is the fact that PHP and JavaScript were basically domain specific languages at their inception.
PHP was a hypertext pre-processor. Pearl, but stripped down for templating.
JavaScript was an alternative to Java applets. When you don't need the full power of Java, you could throw in a few small scripts.
To make things a bit less intimidating, the weak typing seemed like a good idea, and for these use-cases it might very well have been. If you don't know how to program and only want to display some fancy styled text, why would you need to understand that a number isn't a string?
But there was the pattern, that "real" programming languages like Java and C/C++ were hard to learn for the average "creator", so they took JS and PHP as entry and built up their skills from there, building bigger and bigger solutions with those tools.