I think one of the reasons I don’t talk much about Python, is that I am not sure I have much interesting to say about it. It seems to appeal to purists who like their code cleaner looking than pragmatic PHP programmers do. It seems to be a valid choice for big web projects, in that like PHP, you should be able to easily find a high profile application that is much busier than yours is likely to be.

It does not seem to have as big or supportive a community behind it as PHP does. So there are not the same number of books, libraries, blogs, magazines, or whatever to help you out, but there are plenty.

More importantly, the Python community does not seem to have the same degree of blinkered evangelism that elements of the Java and Ruby communities do. There are not many people standing on street corners proclaiming that Python is the perfect language for all tasks, has no trade-offs and is superior to all others in all ways. There may well be people who think it, but perhaps they are the quietly smug type of fan, not the brash, overt type of fan.

The Ruby and Java communities are more fun to prod, as parts of them are very immature and fanboyish. Look at it like this; the “Leave Britney Alone” guy would be fun to wind up. Somebody who says “Actually, I quite like Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up but could take or leave it” would be nowhere near as rewarding to rattle.

I totally enjoyed the podcast made by Laura Thompson and yourself on PHP and MySQL Web Development for OnOpen Source. I especially loved the comments about frameworks and framework developers. I also loved the comments about Ruby on Rails.

I would really like to know, how do you feel about Python? If you had included Python in the comparison of PHP and Ruby, what would you say?

Thanks!

G :-)