Up until the mid-2000s, if you wanted an easy up-and running web application environment without paying Microsoft, PHP plus MySQL was the only game in town. The

Up until the mid-2000s, if you wanted an easy up-and running web application environment without paying Microsoft, PHP plus MySQL was the only game in town. There were alternatives, but they invariably involved maintaining your own server and doing quite a bit of legwork yourself. The was no Heroku, no AWS, and tooling for python, ruby, and other environments required much more expertise to simply get an app responding on port 80. Almost any big app you can point to that is built in PHP today was bootstrapped in this environment. I did a lot of PHP from the late '90s up until 2008. Maybe things have changed in the intervening eight years, but I cant say I miss it.