To be honest: that was quite possibly the greatest part of learning PHP for me! PHP was the first language I learned; the fact that I could deploy it to nearly

To be honest: that was quite possibly the greatest part of learning PHP for me! PHP was the first language I learned; the fact that I could deploy it to nearly any shared host [of which there were a lot of freebies] allowed me to rapidly program and debug; which I find was crucial to my initial learning. Hindsight being 20/20: of course I agree with you, now. But I'm still not convinced that young me would've been able to use the built in server. I certainly couldn't be bothered to setup Apache (et al) and a working PHP interpreter. Rails is a bit different, since you learn about the built in webserver when going through their "hello, world" tutorial. If excellent tutorials surface for PHP, then perhaps I can see the "FTP-to-test" pattern being obsoleted. To me: PHP's greatest asset was that A) I didn't have to setup my own development environment, and B) there were so many [free] development environments already setup! I'd learn to love setting up servers, but that came far later [in my chronology anyways]. tl;dr: FTP and common PHP setups actually removed a large barrier to entry for a young programmer. I think the "FTP-to-test" anti-pattern was probably one of the more useful ones in my toolkit when it came to my initial learning.