The problem comes when deploying PHP to someone elses server. Since apache and PHP are usually tightly coupled together and PHP has a concept of global configuration that applies across the whole server.

So you have some PHP app that works fine locally but fails in weird ways on deployment because the server was configured using cPanel by someone who didn't know what they were doing and if you change settings you risk breaking whatever other random php scripts are running on the server. So you end up hacking around with .htaccess files to get things working.

With Django etc you get a to have a "clean room" and run in relative isolation, only interacting with the outside world via proxies.

What PHP is however is cheap to deploy. It's annoying to have to think about and pay for "instances" , "dynos" , "VPS" etc when you just want to put up a webpage with a bit of server side logic.

> Come on, I hate php with a passion and even I will admit it's easier to deploy than anything else

I don't see how this is true anymore. Setting up LAMP versus setting up LAMPython or Node are all one line of aptitude/(your package manager here). I can have a LAMP stack spitting out "hello world" in the same time it takes me to get a Node app running.

Say you're on a shared host. How do you deploy Python in the same time as copying a few files in? You have to copy the files in and do some more things, which is a strict superset of the PHP way to deploy.

there's mod_python, which has never worked in living memory, and there's PyHP which... went into beta in 2008, and hasn't noticeably changed since.

You can't get any easier then FTPing files. And maybe changing a config. That's all you need to do.

Uh, yeah, do that please.

Would this be useful to you? It might be a bit problematic to integrate with servers (as you'd need the server to support that sort of hackery), but, from what I recall, mod_python did support exactly this use case.