bitprophet posted:

It's very easy to get into, and is generally better than PHP in every way save for not being ubiquitous on shared Web hosting environments like PHP is. I say this as someone who's been paid to write both PHP and Python and is currently paid to do...both

My background pre-Python was Java, VB and PHP and I absolutely fell in love with Python for various reasons. Largely it's just very close to my idea of an ideal language - the syntax is incredible, being both clean and very powerful/concise; the library support is great; the philosophy behind it is well thought out for the most part; the community is full of experienced, intelligent and pragmatic coders from every programming background you could imagine; I could go on.

Comparing to PHP, one of its largest strengths is that it's generally very consistent and clean, where PHP is one huge ugly namespace with inconsistent function names and/or argument specifications.

In addition, PHP's type system is such that it's extremely easy to make mistakes that are difficult to debug (e.g. the implicit cast of a string to an int during some math on line 10 is causing tax to not be applied on line 257, but without any error messages of any sort cropping up) and more explicit languages like Python avoid that almost entirely.