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Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

We've standardised on Python and we're migrating all of our systems to Python / Django / Postgres from PHP / Drupal / WordPress / MySQL. We started out with one senior Dev on the Python stack, and simply found that the productivity on Python/Django just too compelling to stay on PHP. The (senior) Dev on Python had a couple of highly successful projects which resulted with him getting some junior Dev support. Then the other Devs started to notice and saw/felt that they were missing out on better and more advanced tooling. They then started to push to move their main environments to Python/Django. This has further been pushed by the business stakeholders who have seen the Python/Django projects move much faster than PHP projects.

So for us, that is now 6 Devs on Python/Django plus some consultancy support. So we've move from 2 python Devs to 6 Python devs within the last year.

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> We started out with one senior Dev on the Python stack, and simply found that the productivity on Python/Django just too compelling to stay on PHP.

There is nothing inherently "more productive" on one stack over the next. It's just technologies which are fundamentally similar.

A competent senior dev on the python stack would be just as productive as a competent senior dev on a php stack and vice versa.

It just seems like you found a good python developer who knows what he is doing.

Absolutely false.

While PHP has gotten better recently, the language is not nearly as powerful or complete as almost all of the popular alternatives. Up until very recently, something like the Django ORM was impossible to express in PHP. Take an honest look at the available frameworks (especially in comparison to something archaic like Drupal) and you'll find there's no competition.

> While PHP has gotten better recently, the language is not nearly as powerful or complete as almost all of the popular alternatives.

I can prove that python and php are equal in their "power" because I can build compilers/interpreters of one with the other.

If you are arguing that python has better libraries then it's possible though for web development, I'd say most popular languages have similar libraries and capabilities.

But my point was more to the point of expertise in stack. A skilled PHP developer is going to be just as productive with the PHP stack as a skilled python developer.

People who think one stack is better than the other usually base their opinion on poor/bad developers.

There are plenty of horrible python developers as there are php developers.

The "power" of most stacks, especially something closely related as the PHP and Python stacks, are similar.

The difference in productive boils down to competence of developers, not the stack itself.

But that's just my experience and my opinion.

Python certainly has a lot more software written for it. I use it for scientific computing.

For building websites, php has plenty of good options too. I do really like the Silex framework for website construction. I backend process with java or python when needed to do any substantial computations.

The "standardization" on common libraries from symfony and zend, have made everything a lot better.

Referencing a micro-framework shows just how out of the loop you are. A better example of a PHP framework is Yii, but you still see tons of ambiguous arrays used because of the lack of expressiveness in the language.

Zend is not even a contender for modern web application development. And again, the gratuitous use of arrays for configuration highlight the shortcomings of PHP.

And mentioning Yii here instead of, say, Laravel or Symfony (though I loathe the latter) makes me wonder how in the loop you are, yourself.

I've not been a PHP developer for years. I wouldn't go back to it. But pretending it can't compete with Django is one of the weirder things I've seen on HN in a while.

Django everyday since 0.9.6 Still an active maintainer of a small PHP lib, though.

> I wouldn't go back to it.

That's what I'm expressing: there's no reason to choose PHP in 2017. This isn't misdirected 'PHP hate', but a genuine disagreement with the OP's statement:

> There is nothing inherently "more productive" on one stack over the next.

The problem with Drupal isn't PHP, it's Drupal.

> There is nothing inherently "more productive" on one stack over the next. It's just technologies which are fundamentally similar.

It's hard to quantify the differences, but obviously something like Brainfuck is going to be inherently less productive as long as we're talking about human productivity.

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