It is intriguing that nobody's replicated PHP's ease of deployment. Every other language does require downloading some sort of runtime and setting up some sort of templating/page serving system. Would be an interesting experiment to start with essentially an HTML generating DSL like PHP, but with more modern language design.
I think that to use PHP embedded in HTML documents (the classical way, with <?php ?> tags) is effectively just using mod_php for Apache as your templating/page serving system, right?
I haven't used PHP in many many years, and even then only lightly, so forgive me if this is plain wrong. I do somewhat miss how easy it was to add a small amount of dynamic content to a page in those days without having to drastically alter how anything else worked. I used PHP in a lot of projects without ever really needing to learn it well, much the way I see a lot of web developers 'learn' SQL today. Perhaps that's why so much PHP code back then was a clusterfuck.
Yeah I don't actually know. I don't write or really like PHP. But I do begrudgingly admit that PHP advocates have a point when they mention ease of deployment. I don't think any other language has really tackled that properly. Perhaps there's some dead simple Ruby ERB integration that works with a server? I'd love that a lot actually.
They tried with Java (Tomcat/JSP) which from memory wasn't that bad to setup, and I even remember trying a Perl variation where you inlined Perl code instead of PHP, but the name eludes me right now.
I guess PHP just had that first mover advantage. Don't forget that a lot of the simplicity is because your average shared hosting provider has already installed it for you.
