Trying to decide between PHP and Python

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Tomasz Rola" <rtomek at ceti.com.pl>
> On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Dan M wrote:
>
>> As to choice between Python and PHP, I would say learn anything but PHP.
>> Even Perl has fewer tentacles than PHP.
>
> However, the quality of code depends heavily on who writes it. My
> impression is that more folks of "I did it and it works so it is good,
> right?" attitude can be found among Perl/PHP crowd (compared to Python or
> Ruby or...). The reason is probably the "easyness" of those languages
> (mostly because of tons of readymade code on the net) which - wrongly -
> suggests they are already "there", no need to learn anymore.


Yes you are right. Perl is much flexible than all other languages and there
was written a lot of bad code in the past that can now be found on the net,
beeing very hard for a newbie to find only the good examples and tutorials.

But Perl offers many helpful modules for testing the apps so for good
programmers there is not true the idea of "it works so it's ok".

Usually we compare the languages although we always think to all aditional
modules and libraries we can use with them for creating apps.
Thinking this way, Perl is better than Python for creating web apps, because
Catalyst framework is more advanced than the frameworks for Python and it is
more flexible even than Ruby on Rails, DBIx::Class ORM is a very advanced
ORM and a very clean one and Perl web apps can use strong templating systems
and form processors, unicode is a native code for Perl for a long time and
so on.

So how good is the language depends on what you need to use it for.

(But I hope that this won't start a language war, because I have just done 
the same on a Perl mailing list telling about some Perl disadvantages 
towards Python :)

Octavian