"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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
