You are mixing your requirements really badly here: a language that's "dead simple to run" vs a language that works stupidly simple with the web.
Ruby is very easy to run: puts "Hello World"
As is perl: print "Hello World";
Php? <?php echo "Hello World"; ?> (wtf is all that crap, says the new programmer)
The point the OP is trying to make is the "stupid simple with the web" side of the equation. Of course the PHP side isn't as simple as "the language runs on the web". PHP runs on Apache because of the tons of work put into mod_php to integrated it and make it work as easy as possible.
You can't "just run" php on nginx, lighty, etc. Then you need to setup FastCGI instances, and now you're no different from Rails land with mongrels or thins.
I don't understand how this is distinct from PHP's competition. Python is "apt-get install python" — two extra characters are not going to break even the greenest noob's back.
Ruby is very easy to run: puts "Hello World"
As is perl: print "Hello World";
Php? <?php echo "Hello World"; ?> (wtf is all that crap, says the new programmer)
The point the OP is trying to make is the "stupid simple with the web" side of the equation. Of course the PHP side isn't as simple as "the language runs on the web". PHP runs on Apache because of the tons of work put into mod_php to integrated it and make it work as easy as possible.
You can't "just run" php on nginx, lighty, etc. Then you need to setup FastCGI instances, and now you're no different from Rails land with mongrels or thins.