I have a feeling you've gotten so used to deploying PHP that you've forgotten all the headaches involved in it. That's precisely my point! :) and even though

I have a feeling you've gotten so used to deploying PHP that you've forgotten all the headaches involved in it. That's precisely my point! :) and even though there were tons of very smart guys, mostly everybody we brought onto the project took a whole afternoon to get set up. To me that's unacceptable. As mentioned, I can rattle out a PHP environment in minimal time (basically as long as it takes for the installers to run). But task me to work on a Python project, or Rails, it will take a lot longer. I think my larger point was that for an absolute beginner PHP offers some key advantages over other languages (even you simple description of jumping into Python involves some major pain points - like using Linux, the command line, package management, what is git/hg?). The advantage to PHP is purely that it is intended as a web language; Python, Ruby et al require additional steps to get to that stage (or, at least, steps that are not braindead-automated for beginners).