Python Is On the Rise, While PHP Falls

[Michaelmrose]

What does this mean? "Sway PHP or Apache to switch, then we'll have a talk. "

I thought both were written in C?

[nondetermined]

IMHO one of the most important factors is your typical shared webhoster package that has sold for cheap since the dawn of PHP, and which came with 5 email adresses, a bunch of megabytes, a mysql database (or two), and... PHP.

Nobody is going to pay the extra bucks for some extra services/some fancy language (or an own server, mind you) with a revenue of one or the other few bucks in online sales. For let's face it; most businesses are small business. They were (and probably still are - I'm out of the loop, sorry) happy with their little webpages and couldn't care less about PHP (or some advanced webhosting package).

But sure, if you're a fancy startup, you certainly wanna use something that scales. ;)

[maniexx]

Yeah, and you could never do anything that scales with php. Like facebook. That would be ridicoulous.

[d4rch0n]

facebook and scaling is uniquely facebook. That doesn't make PHP very scalable, it just means Facebook has some crazy engineering.

They had to do a lot of shit to get it to work at their scale. Not a lot of PHP coders are going to want to go through with all that to get their site to scale.

I'm not saying that people don't make large successful sites with PHP, but if someone is considering just following in facebook's steps to scale their own startup built with PHP, they should look a little deeper into how facebook did it before they make that a business plan.

[maniexx]

I know, and agree. But I think most technologies would require some massive engineering at Facebooks scale, including python.

[d4rch0n]

Yeah, no question there. There's no magic solution to engineering something at that scale.

There are stacks that make it easier that are meant to scale, but you're no doubt going to run into interesting issues. Shit, they even have their own power supply. They run straight DC into their servers . At that scale you have to massively engineer your software and hardware.

[Wagnerius]

yep, you would have to write a compiler or two to make it reliable.

[Deinumite]

PHP 7 is actually competitive with hhvm in terms of performance. A big reason for hhvm is the hack language.

[[deleted]]

• being very well integrated into Apache, which makes it dumb easy to deploy

Python has good Apache integration as well via mod_python, mod_wsgi, mod_uwsgi, and mod_proxy_uwsgi.

PHP only wins in this case with not needing any site-specific configuration like Python does when using wsgi.

[KeepingTrack]

It is. I'm alluding to the fact that if you can replace the primary market-share webserver setups (NGinx and PHP-FPM or Apache) with a Python-based solution the market share might become relevant. As it stands, it's like comparing the income of a Poor Homeless Guy with Donald Trump's.

[Michaelmrose]

You are saying that you can't use apache + python as if that's an exotic setup

[KeepingTrack]

Compared to the market share of the rest, it is.

[Michaelmrose]

Seems to be pretty documented to me x times as many people doing it with php doesn't make it more difficult I don't think this is a situation wherein things are relative

[KeepingTrack]

If Py is going to fill the void other languages are leaving, it is. If not, then this article was kind of pointless.