Its HTML-inline nature is the entire reason I ever used it. At some point in the early 2000s I came across PHP’s include, which felt like the piece of HTML that’d always been missing. Suddenly I no longer had to manually keep all that header/nav/footer code in sync across N pages! Magical.

It wasn’t until Rails rolled around that I built anything resembling a “real” web app, though. The structure and convention it brought made it much more approachable than PHP, because all the examples of more involved PHP at that point were chaos-spaghetti that was a challenge to tease apart and use as an example for learning.