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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

The only tangible advantage that PHP has these days is in being able to be deployed pretty much everywhere for fairly cheaply.

If 'cost' is your absolute and only criteria, the answer is probably PHP. If place any other criteria above cost for language choices, the answer is probably Python.

Usually these questions involve more, and are harder to answer, but this one's generally pretty easy. Python.

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The only tangible advantage that PHP has these days is in being able to be deployed pretty much everywhere for fairly cheaply.

I mostly use Python these days, and yet I'd have to disagree strongly that easy deployment is PHP's only advantage. Outside of places like Silicon Valley it's a lot easier to find PHP programmers than Python programmers. On top of that many of the PHP programmers will be relatively cheap to hire. And you can get everything from novice developers to senior developers with a lot of experience.

Are there any sites that come to mind that are using Python in the valley? I would love to check them out!

I am from New York and I really don't hear people talk about Python much. For the short amount of time I've been using Python it has made me want to ditch PHP.

Places using Python:

Google, Youtube, Reddit, Yahoo, Quora, Dropbox, Spotify, Hunch, RedHat, Pinterest, Disqus, Mozilla, Instagram, Punchfork, The Onion (probably DC, not valley), etc.

Thank you for sharing! Is there a quick way to identify what sites are running Python? (view source, etc.)

There's a browser add-on for both firefox and chrome to quickly check what's powering a site: http://wappalyzer.com/download

There's builtwith.com - looks at server response headers etc. Doesn't always detect everything because hiding such information is a security advantage for website owners.

Hopefully not. For the most part, that list was compiled from either personal experience or networking (E.g., sitting in on a "how we use Python at Quora" discussion at Pycon, for example). Unless one specifically crafts their HTML to say "Powered by Python" or "Powered by Rails" (sometimes people do, but even those aren't necessarily trustworthy), neither Rails nor Django projects are likely to contain any artifacts that would indicate what they were built with.

Dropbox is a huge one. I mean heck, they even hired the creator.

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