I won't defend PHP as a language, but from an accessibility point of view, other platforms could certainly make things easier.
Coming from a PHP background, the first time I tried Django, I was rather dismayed at the amount of set up involved. I think after following a few tutorials, I was able to more or less get a running mod_WSGI setup, though the only way I could seem to get the web site to refresh was by restarting Apache.
After I got over the fear of using an http daemon written in the same language as my web app, I discovered Ruby / Sinatra, which gave me more or less the same immediacy I was used to from PHP.
Even so, I doubt I could explain Heroku to a non-technical friend in the same way I could convey an understanding of uploading a php web page to a LAMP host. (Ubuntu's broken support for RubyGems didn't do much to help my migration from PHP either).
It seems to me that until Python and Ruby have an infrastructure that's as friendly to novices as PHP is, we'll be seeing the same "PHP ghetto" effect that we've been seeing for the past decade.
Coming from a PHP background, the first time I tried Django, I was rather dismayed at the amount of set up involved. I think after following a few tutorials, I was able to more or less get a running mod_WSGI setup, though the only way I could seem to get the web site to refresh was by restarting Apache.
After I got over the fear of using an http daemon written in the same language as my web app, I discovered Ruby / Sinatra, which gave me more or less the same immediacy I was used to from PHP.
Even so, I doubt I could explain Heroku to a non-technical friend in the same way I could convey an understanding of uploading a php web page to a LAMP host. (Ubuntu's broken support for RubyGems didn't do much to help my migration from PHP either).
It seems to me that until Python and Ruby have an infrastructure that's as friendly to novices as PHP is, we'll be seeing the same "PHP ghetto" effect that we've been seeing for the past decade.