Why PHP is so much more popular for web-development

[walterbyrd]

"Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your
desiny. Consume you, it will."
- Yoda

I'm fairly new to web-development, and I'm trying out different
technologies. Some people wonder why PHP is so popular, when the
language is flawed in so many ways. To me, it's obvious: it's because
it's much easier to get started with PHP, and once somebody gets
started with a particular language, that person is likely to stay with
that language.

Before you can even get started with Python web-development, you have
to understand this entire alphabit soup of: CGI, FASTCGI, MOD_PYTHON,
FLUP, WSGI, PASTE, etc. For me, configuring fastcgi has been the most
difficult part of getting django to work. PHP developers don't have to
bother with anything like that. With PHP, you just throw some code in
the middle of your html file.

Also, PHP, and PHP frameworks, are supported everywhere. If you going
to use a PHP MVC framework, like codeignitor, you would have a hard
time finding a hoster that didn't support it - all you need is php4
and mysql. Dollar-hosting, for $10 a year, should work just fine with
codeignitor. With codeignitor, just copy your files to whatever host,
and that's it, you're done.

By contrast, the most popular Python frameworks have sky-high system
requirements. Take a look at the requirements and/or recomendations
for popular Python frameworks like Django, TurboGears, or CherryPy:
Apache 2.0, mod_python (latest version), fastcgi (at least), command
line access, PostgreSQL. And a lot of low-cost hosters don't support
Python at all.

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that PHP is better than Python for
web-development. But, I sometimes think that Python could learn a few
things from PHP.

All JMHO, of course.