Well put.

The closest thing I've found is the serve gem, which lets me launch a web server from my current working directory. It lets me quickly mock something up in ERB, Haml and SASS without messing with Rails or Sinatra. As a complete newbie, with no coding experience, PHP is a much easier hill to climb than Rails or Django, which is Mt Everest by comparison.

Look at all the questions on stackoverflow from total beginners: they don't understand much of what they are doing yet, but they already have working forms and several pages and, well, results.

Of course, that's also part of what makes people hate php.

I understand why that is, but I can't help but think that it's optimizing for an edge case instead of the whole operation. I'm willing to invest a little bit longer to get to "Hello World" on day one if it means a lot less pain for every day to follow.

Other technologies can try to push on the "PHP problem" from above, and they can make a lot of progress, but they won't ever "win" because the inertia of PHP is coming from below. The only way to fully get rid of PHP is to beat it on its home turf, and that's firmly in the "Hello World" realm.

When trying to answer the question of "what tools should I, as a serious professional who is in this for the long-term, choose to work with right now?" it's really short-sighted to balance everything on how easy it is to get to "Hello World".

Would you choose an operating system based on how easy it was to install, or how pleasant it was to use?