[dissent]

That's not entirely true.

It just moved the work somewhere else, generally an Apache config on a shared host. The user could very often just dump some PHP files in place and they'd be served up, but if you had to set up a new host then it was as fiddly as anything else.

This pattern also meant dropping everything the docroot, using .htaccess to hide things, having different behaviour depending on the global php.ini. All architectures had to be mashed into a request/response cycle (and anything more complex was no longer just drop the files in). It was a very long way from the idea of reproducable builds.

I agree it was popular, but not really for the right reasons.

[iainctduncan]

Oh come on, it was waaay easier for beginners to set up than Java, Python, Ruby,or Perl at the time. Not even comparable.