I agree that PHP's superior usability for newbs begins in the first five minutes. But I don't think that's the whole story. You can also embed Perl, Ruby, or (I

I agree that PHP's superior usability for newbs begins in the first five minutes. But I don't think that's the whole story. You can also embed Perl, Ruby, or (I presume) Python in a simple HTML page. (Though I believe that there is no canonical, preinstalled, universally accepted way of doing so, which is a big usability problem.) And I don't know of any technical reason why Perl couldn't come installed on a $3.99 web hosting account. (Perhaps it did, back in the day. I no longer remember. I did web programming in Tcl back then.) I've also heard that Python is fairly easy to host, and even Ruby is getting there -- Heroku gives you Rails, for perhaps even less effort than it takes to use your cheap webhost's PHP. You don't even have to figure out ssh or FTP to use Heroku. But, alas, the problem is bigger than that. It's not just the first five minutes of Perl that are tough. It's the twenty hours after that. And something like Rails, which requires you to be familiar with databases and OOP, is on yet a higher plane of difficulty.