Good question. Apache, myqql and PHP comes in a single install package, so you download, click to install and find your home directory where you can start writ

Good question. Apache, myqql and PHP comes in a single install package, so you download, click to install and find your home directory where you can start writing code. No configuration necessary. That's important to me, because configuration isn't what I'm interested in. Wordpress, PHPBB and a host of other stuff is the same: Place it in a folder, and run through the HTML based setup. Done. Deploying on a hosted solution is equally easy; copy the PHP files from yuor localhost directory to the host, copy the DB using the webbased mysql manager and you're done. Also, I like the fact that there's a direct and obvious link between the files you create and the pages you see. Create something.php in your home directory and it will appear as something.php in localhost. I checked out a few other languages, and there appeared to be a non-trivial link between files and HTML. Also, the PHP community is very helpful for beginners. Asking what an array is, or how to display the time in a snippet of HTML isn't frowned upon, but respectfully answered. I'm fully aware of the drawbacks of this simplistic approach such as spaghetti code, security concerns, scalability and probably much more. But that isn't really the point, if I'm making a microsite for a friend, or a mockup to see if something will work I don't really care.