On Wed, 22 Jul 2009, Jon Gorman wrote:

[trimmed]

> Good point.  One of my main thoughts was that ruby and python are both
> "hot" languages right now and there might be a lot of tutorials and
> tolerance out there now for the "hello world" type of approaches.  I
> also considered for suggesting perl, but was afraid of being stoned
> ;).  PHP is popular and a pretty common entry language and it does
> have a nice feedback loop as you pointed out.  One concern would be
> that to get a handle on the web app related stuff you'll need a web
> server + php.  That's been getting easier and easier to set up though.

XAMPP or any of the '*AMP' bundles make giving you a platform for PHP / 
Perl (or Python) web development completely trivial:

 	http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMP_packages

-Joe