now the moral of this story is, that when you try to do anything interesting in php it craps out because of the quality of the libraries you are using. It is too easy to code something and then read somewhere that your app that uses a function like 'array_key_exists' is really slow and better to use isset. It's too many things put together into a franken-mess, the community is great but it's like herding cats. From what I've read and from my initial impresssion-and I'm too much of a noob to say with authority-that python's libraries are just better quality and more performant. Some of this comes from the principle of the language for there to be only one good way to do something.

Personally, I love php and will probably still continue to use it because I work with drupal and codeigniter, no way aroudn that. But I probably will be transitioning to python. Pydocs can't compete with php.net though, and that's probably why it hasn't taken over market share. If you could have web programmers who get onboard with python, they could leverage their skills to make real desktop apps without having to do something stupid prism, adobe air, google gears type browser-development enviroments.

now the moral of this story is, that when you try to do anything interesting in php it craps out because of the quality of the libraries you are using. It is too easy to code something and then read somewhere that your app that uses a function like 'array_key_exists' is really slow and better to use isset. It's too many things put together into a franken-mess, the community is great but it's like herding cats. From what I've read and from my initial impresssion-and I'm too much of a noob to say with authority-that python's libraries are just better quality and more performant. Some of this comes from the principle of the language for there to be only one good way to do something.

Personally, I love php and will probably still continue to use it because I work with drupal and codeigniter, no way aroudn that. But I probably will be transitioning to python. Pydocs can't compete with php.net though, and that's probably why it hasn't taken over market share. If you could have web programmers who get onboard with python, they could leverage their skills to make real desktop apps without having to do something stupid prism, adobe air, google gears type browser-development enviroments.

> Python has delivered much scalable applications than PHP
I dare to say that you even do not have any definition of “scalable” in your mind at the moment. You think that I don't have any experience with Plone, which is a deadly slow application?

> Many of the Google applications are in Python.
> Why do you think they have chosen Python?

Do you know that PHP powers lot of extremely high traffic websites in the world? Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Rapidshare ….. Why do they build them in PHP, not Python? Which ones are in Python? Google? Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Earth are made in Java and C++. Lot of Python code used in Google is for batch proccessing

> Python applications are rather complex and
> usually involve a lot better programmers who take care of the security issues.
Why are they complex? Because of complexity nature of Python language or project requirements? Why are they developed with so-called “lot better programmers”? Who are “lot better programmers”? Where do they come from? Why do they work on Python projects instead of PHP, Java, C#? You need to explain all the things before you conclude.

You are making assumptions that Python is apparently better than PHP without any evidence or even knowledge

If you are calling the md5 function then this is irrelevant , because the function is written in C you're benchmarking the loop not the md5 algorithm implementation, both languages are glue, they call module functions written usually in C, most scripts written in these languages will be a bunch of such calls with some little glue code to hold them together.

Neither php or python is used to write complex algorithms or data structures (imagine writing something like the md5 algorithm in php or python, they are extremly slow for intensive processing algorithms).

So performance lies in your algorithm implementation and in the algorithms built in the C (mostly) core of the language, parsing and evaluating code is just a very small percent of the overall performance, from this point of view (performance) they are the mostly the same.

let say my 5 cents…

-PHP has too crappy embedding system. I guess its need for Zend.com… PHP seems as not free for this reason.

-Python has poorly support for static variables, methods. This is not suitable.

-Pythons indentations is a hidden jail

-Not good bytecode support in PHP. APC and others cant store cached code as separated “static file”.

-Pythons has many bicycles for runing in web servers.

-Require_once, Include_once, autoload is hell in PHP

-Too late and asswide namespace support in PHP

-No _private and _protected vars, methods in Python

Python applications are rather complex and usually involve a lot better programmers who take care of the security issues. I am not saying that Python is more scalable than PHP but if you look at the big applications and new app's coming out you will notice how Python has delivered much scalable applications than PHP. Many of the Google applications are in Python. Why do you think they have chosen Python?

You can compare language implementation performance by comparing a set of large enough and most used functions and language constructs.

So what do you mean by “tends to lead to much more scalable applications”? Any case study?

a python application does not scale better, cause it's python, but maybe someone considered better strategies to build the application.

I do believe that PHP need a good reworking thou to get around the too many chefs cooking a can of chicken noodle soup syndrome.

Choosing language to get the job done isn't that easy and you need to be aware of every aspects of supported features of the programming language .

I think you are simply coding in PHP or Python at very beginner level because only beginner can say words like you said above.

PHP vs. Python!? Who cares!?

Use the tools and programming language that gets the job done the fastest, easiest and most clean way.

And several other hints:
- PHP namespaces are coming already to version 5.3
- upward compatibility you mention as Python's highlight is myth; read Python 3 aka 3000 planned changes and you'll learn there is planned to break many existing APIs

This is wrong, PHP can run as embedded, CGI or seperate process.