PHP, Python and Persuasion

"[...] Now, all of these statistics are flawed in a variety of ways, PHP's included, and the bigger a community is, the more they will be flawed — for example, PyPI download stats will often be way out because people are using mirrors etc — but this doesn't affect the point I'm making.

The point is that all the communities are large, and these figures are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much is going on in each and every community. And from within a community, you can see some big figures and think “well I doubt anyone could seriously be competing with that!”. This is true no matter what community you belong to. And it makes it difficult to communicate in a meaningful way. Very few can honestly say that they've evaluated the alternatives in a fair way, because the alternatives are so huge. [...]"

This really contrasts with statements in Fabien Potencier's article like "Yes, PHP has a better dependency manager than any other languages." or "PHP is the best web platform... ever".