[OPINION] - does language really matter if they all do the same thing?

Diez B. Roggisch deets_noospaam at web.de
Sat Jan 24 20:55:23 EST 2004


Hi,

> Has anyone here ever looked at different languages for making an
> interactive website, and felt that Python was the best choice of
> language to use?
> 
> It would definitely be a learning curve for me, since I know PHP so well,
> but if it had some great benefits, I'd go for it.
> (Half just for fun, to learn something new.)

As others have pointed out, PHP is _made_ for creating websites. Some people
are using it for general purpose programming, but its not tailored to that.
Thats a major difference to python: Its aim is programming in general. Its
power for certain task comes from the ease of creating libs, tools and apps
for these special cases: twisted for networking, ZOPE (and others) for
webapps, COM access, GUI building and so on. 

For websites, I tried ZOPE - and quite love it. But I'm a programmer at
first, not so much a website designer. And while there are great products
for ZOPE, like PLONE or ZMS, that give you a fully featured CMS with a
couple of clicks, I have to admit that DTML and even TAL/METAL as
templating languages are a kludge. At least for someone with a "how do I
get this particular task done ASAP"-attitude. PLONE and ZMS both encourage
separation of data from presentation. This is very good from a purist POV,
and has advantages in larger environments where some people provide app
logic and others the layout. But for small projects, it bears unecessary
complexity.

So - if your goal is just to enhance your forum with a "new
articles"-counter, you almost surely are better of with PHP. But if your
projects get more elaborated with complex data models, or you want to
explore programming beyond HTML-generation, I urge you to give Python a
try.

Regards,

Diez



More information about the Python-list mailing list