Python v PHP: fair comparison?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Michael Torrie a écrit :
> On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 18:55 -0800, Luis M. González wrote:
> 
>>>- Python is more readable, and more general purpose
>>
>>Yes, php is only for web.
> 
> 
> Absolutely false. 

 From a purely technical POV, you're of course right. But PHP has been 
hacked (nobody in it's own mind would pretend it has ever been 
'designed') for web programming, and since the language by itself is 
totally and definitively braindead, using it for anything else is either 
  masochism or lack of knowledge of better solutions. Heck, even Perl is 
better for pure admin/scripting tasks.

> Most of my standalone, command-line scripts for
> manipulating my unix users in LDAP are written in PHP,

Yuck.

> although we're
> rewriting them in python.
> 
> Although I can't think of a single app written in php that's not web-
> based (other than standalone scripts I have written), there are up-to-
> date php bindings for GTK: http://gtk.php.net/

As a matter of fact, while PHP *can* be used for GUI and CLI apps, 
you'll have hard time finding non-web PHP-based projects... OTOH, you'll 
find Python everywhere, from sys-admin scripts to full-blown web 
application servers to rich GUI clients. There must be a reason...