That assumes you have PHP already installed on the server right? I mean if you already have nodejs on the server, you can also just drop files in
Now it's far more likely to find a hosting provider that already has PHP set up over NodeJS, but as the main article observed, those are in decline. That seems to me as simply a lack of demand. If people want static sites, theres no need for PHP. If people want even a bit of dynamicism, then it's not hard to use a framework, and you get far more scalability. The barrier to entry for these frameworks is so low that it's not worth using barebones PHP and then having to rewrite everything if you start wanting more.
node.js also implements a deployment model, but it's a different one. (node.js rather than JS is maybe a closer analogue to PHP.) nodemon gets you partway to the PHP model (by restarting your server when something changes) but not all the way; it doesn't start running random files it finds lying around. And people never run it in production.
So, in summary, it is comprehensively not true that if you're already running node.js on the server, you can just drop files in. If you just drop files in, node.js will ignore them.
There's an enormous difference between claiming that "you can also just drop files on your server" and have a running application, which is what you said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246963, and claiming that "[some] people don't need nor want" to just drop files on their server and have a running application, which is what you're saying now.
Now you're bringing up "drag and drop functionality", which is a GUI gesture, totally irrelevant to the things PHP's deployment model enables, which you are correct are things that some people don't want. Here are some examples:
1. You can unzip a zipfile of PHP on your server and have a running app. This is super helpful when you're a novice who doesn't know much about processes and sockets.
2. You can add a new URL by sshing into the server and typing "cp homepage.php homepagenew.php", even using a slow or low-bandwidth connection. Then you can incrementally change the new URL's behavior by editing that new file, while the main site hums along unaffected—at least until you hose the production database. If you want to change the old version, you can type "mv homepagenew.php homepage.php".
3. If you have two PHP apps, like MediaWiki and WordPress, you can unzip them in two different directories on your server and have two apps running on the same server. If one of them is broken, even contains parse errors, it doesn't affect the other one. You can add links in one of them that link to the other.
4. You can temporarily disable a page by typing "chmod 0 upload.php", without breaking any other pages and without slowing down the server.
5. You can host apps belonging to hundreds of mutually untrusting users in the same Apache process, running on different virtual hosts, without the different users being able to screw up each other's "sites".
6. You can break into somebody's website by uploading a file to it with a .php extension in a directory that the webserver is (mis)configured to execute PHP files in.
7. You can make a usable backup of an old version of a page by typing "cp homepage.php homepage.old.4.php". Which you can later restore in a similar way, without affecting other pages, by doing the reverse. Without learning how to use Git.
8. You can load a page in your browser and not have to think about whether possibly the running server has an old version of the page in its memory and that's why your attempted fix has no effect.
Now, PHP has never been my tool of choice; it's optimized by, and written by, people who don't know how to program, and I'd already been making web pages for years when it came out. It has its share of embarrassing bonehead design errors that can now never be fixed, though it did fix a lot of them. I like getting error messages instead of wrong results when I try to run broken code; it's one of the major reasons I switched from Perl to Python for soft stuff, near the turn of the millennium. I already know how to use version control systems, so I don't find it reassuring to have a directory full of "homepage.old.4.php". I want to be able to run the whole site on my laptop, not using the production database, and I want to be able to use a staging server. I don't want to have to worry about whether someone else has edited the files in production and that's why this page, that never should have worked, has always worked, until today. And I especially don't want my site getting popped because the uploads directory treated .php files as plain text but .php4 files as executable PHP. (Oops!)
But the fact is that PHP's deployment model enables beginning programmers to manage a website by putting files in directories, copying files around, making backup copies of files, and so on, without ever taking their entire site down with a parse error at startup, and, as far as I know, there is nothing even vaguely similar for node.js. Nodemon isn't it. Express isn't either.
You're definitely right, but the entire lament seems like a lot of special catering for the convenience of an audience that is technical enough to write PHP, but isn't particularly accommodating to, like, the actual masses of people out in the world who are not and will not ever be inclined to wade through the issues inherent to setting up a shared hosting plan with a PHP provider and hashing out their craving to publish by fiddling with templating code.
The author of this piece has a lot to say about SPAs and other client-side fads, which is fair. Lots of what makes up current trends in the "modern" Web is an abomination. But the PHP application/deployment model they advocate for is nothing special wrt the affordances it makes for non-technical folks, nor is it a particularly good implementation of TBL's original vision for the Web—despite the implicit ("explicit"?) claims in the article to the contrary. On both of those fronts, stuff like Zonelets <https://zonelets.net/> has moral superiority (despite its being basically a toy). The essence of Zonelets is also, at a fundamental level, much closer to what we see with SPAs than the "mildly dynamic websites" of yore.
These people may drift out of doing any programming as and when it becomes unnecessary. It's similar to the sentiments expressed with GeoCities, where you had web design being done by amateurs who weren't very good at it. Nowadays they probably use some kind of site generator and aren't exposed to HTML at all.
Of course one can say that these these things are better left to professionals, but it's clear I'm not the only one with a clear sense that we've lost something here. Neocities, for example, is a clear reaction to that.
It's similar to how home computers used to boot to a command prompt and now they don't. They essentially invited you to learn how they worked, whereas the modern desktop computing experience tries to seem as magic as possible. Many people of a certain generation probably learnt to program as kids on these old 8-bits because the machines themselves basically invited to. As a professional programmer now I'm genuinely unsure what I would recommend to a child of the same age today.
The KBFS-backed keybase.pub and the never-officially-launched Keybase Pages also had such huge potential.
0. Arduino. You can make colors and sounds that aren't locked in a box and that communicate over infrared. You can drive motors. In some cases, you can repurpose parts from existing consumer electronics. I had the privilege one weekend of helping out with a beginner programming class for artists; in about four hours they went from not knowing what a variable was to being able to program the robots they'd been given to follow a line around a racetrack. (Adults, but evidence suggests Arduino is good enough for kids too.)
1. Minetest. If they like Minecraft, Minetest is a Minecraft clone where they can write mods in Lua. This requires juggling a lot of files, and it can be difficult to figure out why existing mods are doing one thing or another, but you can add new mobs and blocks to the world that affect existing ones in a wide variety of ways. You can play it on your phone, even hosting a server, but there isn't a reasonable way to edit mods on your phone. And if you've spent a few hours playing Minetest the things in the simulated Minetest world can seem very real to you, which makes programming them more appealing.
2. Scratch or, on Squeak, EToys. A lot of kids seem to find Scratch easy to start out with but then want to switch to a textual programming language because they see it as more "grown up". And to be fair Scratch does have some real intrinsic limitations. EToys has maybe a smoother path to full Smalltalk but kids may not be impressed by full Smalltalk if they don't see adults using it.
3. Browser JS. The applicability and deployability is super high, and the barrier to entry here is pretty low if you have a desktop browser: type data:text/html,<a href="javascript:alert('hi')">x into the address bar. Graphics, sound, and multitouch APIs are available. You can easily load in images, including animated GIFs, composite them with alpha, and move them around and stretch them.
For more elaborate graphics there's both a pixel-based <canvas> API and a vector-based SVG API. You can draw SVGs with Inkscape. You can render a fractal in <canvas> in an OG Tweet, though color costs a few more bytes:
<canvas onclick="c=this.getContext('2d');function d(x,y,k){
c.fillRect(x,y,1,1);(k/=2)>1&&(d(x,y,k),d(x,y+=k,k),d(x+k,y,k))
}d(0,0,150)">
Video games are very doable in browser JS, and the situation has improved significantly in the last five, ten, and twenty years. Beginners, especially kids, would probably benefit from a game engine library here because they don't know how to combine constructs to solve problems yet. I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/invaders one day last March, but that's four pages of code full of arcane constructs like row.push((x / barricades.dx / 2 + 12) % 16 < 8). I refactored a game engine ("qj2d") out of it and got http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qvaders, but I haven't tried to teach anyone else to use the game engine, and it has some stumbling blocks and boilerplate.
Chris DeLeon demonstrates coding Pong in Notepad with <canvas> in 5½ minutes in https://youtu.be/KoWqdEACyLI as a teaser for a longer course.
JSFiddle and similar services make it easy to anonymously share your work without signing up for a hosting plan.
4. Micropython, or Adafruit's fork, Circuitpython, as an alternative to the Arduino environment. Circuitpython is focused on getting beginners, especially kids, up and running with a smooth UX. What we were saying above about dropping PHP files in a directory on a server to run them? Well, with Circuitpython you drop Python files in a directory on a USB device to run them. AFAIK they don't run on the AVR that's in the traditional Arduino boards but they do run on another half-dozen types of microcontrollers, mostly ARM.
5. Proce55ing. The Arduino IDE is a fork of the Proce55ing IDE, which is optimized for making mouse-interactive graphics on the CPU, but it can also straightforwardly do sound, integrate with additional sensors and actuators, load GPU shaders, and so on. It's been demonstrated to be very accessible to adult beginners, and I think it works for kids too. You can export the results as Android apps. It normally uses its own Java-like language but there are also JS and Python versions.
6. Shadertoy. There are a lot of graphical effects that are straightforward to achieve on in a shader on the GPU but difficult or impossible to achieve on the CPU, and the Shadertoy website makes it easy to get started with that; you can edit the shader live and see the results in your browser, and save it to a URL. Also maybe check out Patricio Gonzalez Vivo's The Book of Shaders.
7. PyGame, the Python binding for SDL. You can write games in PyGame (solarwolf is in apt, and you can find others with apt-cache rdepends python-pygame) but also it's good for the kind of interactive graphical art Proce55ing is great at. You can get a blue rectangle on the screen as simply as this:
#!/usr/bin/python
from pygame import *
pantalla = display.set_mode((0, 0), FULLSCREEN)
draw.rect(pantalla, 128, (50, 100, 200, 400))
display.flip()
time.delay(2000)
8. Godot.
The commitment to this claim is the source of contention.
On "technical enough to write PHP" vs "technical enough to drive a car": there's a much lower barrier to entry for the latter than the former. The latter is about the same as merely operating a computer. Derping around in PHP is def a level above that.
Regardless of theoretical considerations, it's clearly the case that at least hundreds of thousands of people have used PHP without previous programming experience, and from talking to them (and maintaining their code, eugh, and worse, tweaking their servers—via TeamViewer on one occasion) I think the dirt-simple deployment model is a major enabler of that. They don't have to learn about decentralized version control and build processes to get something running.
As I said elsewhere I think a lot of beginners are programming instead in Roblox and hosting their sites on Wordpress or something.
Not saying they are good, but someone starting out wouldn’t ever start installing things like that.