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"It’s been very interesting beginning my trajectory in web development in 2012... [PHP] might be the best language to use in gaining an understanding of the fundamentals of web development... No web development language outside of PHP grants you the kind of flexibility to both (a) produce genuine functionality from scratch, outside of an MVC framework, and also to (b) work within the bounds of MVC in deeply sophisticated ways if you wish."

I believe you have overstated your case, perhaps due to inexperience with other languages. In particular, claiming that any modern scripting language is inflexible sounds a bit crazy.

I have attempted explaining how to get a WAMP stack running, with EasyPHP, to an absolutely new-to-web-dev indiviual who was curious about creating a chat room. Let me just say that the situation is ten times better now than when I was the same age and was poring, lost, over Bruce Eckel's Thinking In Java trying to do the same thing, which must have been sometime around 1999/2000.

These efforts to teach a newcomer reminded me that there's a lot I take for granted. There is a step where you are saying "okay, we've got to see where Apache is; what port is it listening on, how can we get you to phpMyAdmin; here's how you set up rows and columns in your tables and think about a database; no the reason it's not working is because you saved as '.html' and not '.php'; I know you've seen URLs that don't end in '.php' but that requires invoking the Rewrite Engine and teaching you about .htaccess files; oh the header modifications can't be the first thing you emit; here's the docs, you basically have to search them because there is no organizing principle and no way to find out what you can do..."

I agree, Python+Django will make you learn a bunch of weird "modeling" stuff first. To me, setting up the data model at the beginning of an app is like inputting a character name at the beginning of an RPG: as some sources testify [1], you can easily waste several hours on purely aesthetic concerns before you even really start to play.

Nonetheless, Python+Django comes with a lightweight dev server and an interactive console and a routing table, as well as a template language. The knowledge of the database is internalized to the language, so that I don't have to teach someone how to use phpMyAdmin but rather when to use a ForeignKey. If we talk purely about learning to develop on the Web then PHP has much, much more useless overhead.

Sure, eventually we will have to get a production-ready web server communicating with the application, but that can be abstracted until later with Django: it occurs as an up-front teaching cost with PHP.

I say this not even as a Python aficionado per se. If anything I like Node, and Node is nowhere near either of them in offering pleasant functionality.

[1] http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20030630

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<ul><?php foreach ($users as $user) { ?><li class="user"><a href="/users/<?php echo $user['id'] . '">' . $user['name']. '</a></li>'; ?><?php } echo '</ul>';

output += """  <ul>""" + "".join([""" <li><a href="/users/%i">%s</a></li>""" % (u['id'], u['name']) for u in users]) + """ </ul> '<li><a href="/users/%i">%s</a></li> % (u['id'], u['name']) for u in users]) + """