The trivial example of PHP is equivalent to making a file with only the text: Hello World! ...and saving it as a .php file. I think you'll have a hard time

The trivial example of PHP is equivalent to making a file with only the text: Hello World! ...and saving it as a .php file. I think you'll have a hard time finding something more concise. :) In reality, one of the things that makes PHP an easy language to pick up is that you don't have to have all of the overhead of learning how it works. Novices sprinkle bits of PHP surrounded by HTML-looking tags and all of the sudden they're up and running. I started with PHP myself, and found it to be an interesting and frustrating language (needle or haystack argument first?). It's often saved by an easily searchable manual and a huge user base. PHP is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot language. It'll happily let you do dangerous, awful, bad, bad things. This wouldn't be such an issue if there was a higher barrier to entry, the real problem is it's easy to pick up (is that really a "problem"?), but that's a feature not a bug.