> The "easy in a good way" part. Or rather, the "easy in a way which > doesn't need shell access, know where the perl on your system is, and > require that you completely rebuild your simple beginner web page and > wrap it in a hashbang and print statements in order to just put > today's date at the top".
Well, I don't know about getting todays date on the top, but the rest of that sounds like Perl if it's not packaged with your system. You know that once upon a time there were still a few systems like that? :) Of course Apple includes Perl in OS X. Unfortunately, they now also include PHP. Now, riddle me this. Why, when the OS ships with a Cocoa binding for fetching web pages, and it ships with libcurl, and it ships with Perl, and Tcl, and god knows what else... why would someone run a PHP script to fetch a file over HTTP? > PHP does, of course, have security holes so large they should be > considered gaping security caverns surrounded by twinkly fairy lights, > but don't be fooled into thinking that this is a major factor in its > success; more, a happy little side-effect. It's not the security holes, it's that it lets you pretend they're not there. Until you go out in the rain and the tissue paper covering them gets soggy.