Comment by adambrenecki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adambrenecki | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Perhaps, but when it comes to PHP's niche—websites—it's easier to _get started_ than basically any other language.

Got a simple Hello World PHP site? Open your SFTP client, drag and drop, done.

Got a Hello World Python app? You have to know about WSGI adapters, process monitors, usually some sort of reverse proxying, how you're going to handle your static files, and so on.

Oh, and let's not forget that to even get to that point, you needed to use a framework of some kind, which meant wrestling with Pip and virtualenvs; you can't just 'echo "Hello World"'.

I'm picking on Python here because web dev in Python is my day job, but the story is similar for many other languages.

Why bother? You can just put your Python script into a CGI-enabled server like you do with PHP:

    #!/usr/local/bin/python2
    import cgi
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"
    query = cgi.FieldStorage()
    if "name" in query:
        print "Hello, %s!" % query["name"].value
    else:
        print """
        <p>Insert your name and hit Go! to get greeted!</p>
        <form action='/cgi-bin/hello-py.cgi' method='get'>
          <input type='text' name='name'/>
          <button type='submit'>Go!</button>
        </form>"""

chmod 750 and go.

Yes, this is certainly an advantage. Getting to hello world is easier.

Though that might be mitigated somewhat by things like Heroku and App Engine. My first Python code was with the latter, and I didn't even realise I was using it.

Actually, I'd say that these days that crown has been taken from PHP by Node.JS. It may not be as popular but it is definitely easier to work with than PHP, if only becausee it's 1. JavaScript and 2. Doesn't have most (all?) of the warts of PHP.

Of course it introduces a few of its own but on the whole I'd say Node is definitely easier to work with for a newcomer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com