@jws That's helpful. I think what I lack, and have never really seen discussed in the few online courses and pages I have looked at, is how to set up a basic development environment suitable for a dabbler.
One reason I spent the weekend doing what I did is that I like how Script Debugger gives me a good view of what is going on. I can see whether my script will compile, view the value of variables at each stage, step through the command, etc etc.
So far, I have not yet come across, or managed to cobble together, a similar kind or arrangement for PHP or anything else.
It's that kind of thing, so often taken for granted, that I really need. Running a program with vardump() and echo and all that is much harder for me.