It sucks that you didn't get a local PHP env working easily, but I think you're an outlier there. The ease to get up and running with PHP is widely credited as a big factor in its success.

I used a thing called 'easyphp' (executable that just gave you a wamp stack and just told you which dir to stick your php files in).

Well, I'm talking about easy vs simple. I never got a local PHP(+Apache+MySQL) env working simply back then.

easyphp.exe and wamp.exe are two good examples of what I mean.