Even more interestingly, these two attributes combined to create something very special in PHP1: support for the “hackish state”, an environment optimal for casual tinkering with server-side scripting — without having to bring out a whole framework and take the time to set it up. If you had an idea for some kind of dynamic, server-side behaviour, you could probably have it prototyped in PHP in 15 minutes. It might be crude, but it would be real. But the “hackish state” of web development that PHP supported went beyond this in a way that, having experienced it, I find hard to describe; perhaps the closest analogy is environments designed to enable programmatic art, like the interesting recent development of live music programming environments. You could call it a kind of jamming.