Trying to decide between PHP and Python

[flebber]

On Jan 5, 6:48 pm, "Octavian Rasnita" <orasn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Tomasz Rola" <rto... 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

My two cents, I am understanding python far better by learning scheme.
Didn't intentionally set out to achieve that as a goal just a by
product. An excelent resource http://htdp.org and using the racket
scheme ide(as much of an ide as idle), simple thorough well explained
concepts via worked examples and a very encouraging and enthusiastic
mail group, much like this list.

I would so love a book like that for python but after i complete htdp
I may not need it.

Regards

Sayth