Your example of simplicity is a bit conflated since you don't even need PHP to put hello world on a internet visible web page in the first place:
echo 'hello world' > /var/www/index.html
Set up something a little more useful albeit trite such as a blog and you wouldn't be able to do that in 10 minutes with PHP without using a framework either. PHP is great for "unit testing" of ideas but once it grows out of that it's debateable
I do concur that deploying a Python or Ruby web app is a pain in the ass. Installing git and installing Heroku, you're only 2 lines of code away though.
OK, so here we have someone who knows PHP but not Git. Knowing PHP, probably they're a web developer and have also learned the standard stack there: HTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, and Subversion. And with the way the HTML5 family of technologies is exploding nowadays, that's no small feat.
You're saying that learning Git is going to be the barrier to someone switching to Ruby? Naw, don't think so.
We're making different assumptions. You're assuming a well-rounded web developer that just wants to deploy, while I'm thinking more from the beginner developer perspective. We're both right with our assumptions applied.
echo 'hello world' > /var/www/index.html
Set up something a little more useful albeit trite such as a blog and you wouldn't be able to do that in 10 minutes with PHP without using a framework either. PHP is great for "unit testing" of ideas but once it grows out of that it's debateable
I do concur that deploying a Python or Ruby web app is a pain in the ass. Installing git and installing Heroku, you're only 2 lines of code away though.