These threads always get "interesting" don't they?
A common problem I see in these kinds of discussions is engineers. Yup, you and me. In my case it took me years to move away from being a typical clueless egocentric engineer. I am sure I still am to some extent. Whatever is left pales in comparison to my younger self.
What made the change? Business. And the realities of the insanely simple business equation coupled with actually launching and running them with my own money.
There's a huge difference between holding a cat by the tail and watching someone else do it from afar. Huge.
Where I am going with this is that we (engineers and technical folk) tend to focus on, and talk about, FEATURES almost at the expense of BENEFITS. The reality of business is that the value of the former pales in comparison with that of the latter.
I love Python. However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days. Liking it has nothing to do with making the choice. Well, it shouldn't.
I wish engineers could see what they sound like from the vantage point of a business person. You see this all the time at pitch events. There's an absolutely abysmal difference between presentations from "virgin" engineers and those who have had even a few business scars.
What type of benefits/features would you break PHP/python down to when making that choice?
I'm wondering if it is also influenced by long/short term view of the benefits. IMO PHP has extremely high short-term benefits, but many of those break down when taking a longer term view on development and maintenance (mainly because the benefits for one often end up being liabilities for the other).
>However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days
For what? We were already heavily invested in PHP, but still our benefit analysis had it second last, only ahead of javascript. What benefits were we missing?
If you have a team that already rocks on PHP, migrating people to Python is likely to be a problem.
Depending on where you are located, finding good Python programmers could be difficult (stats: over 10x more PHP programmers than Python.
If your project is pretty far along, translating to Python might carry with it a non-trivial cost.
In general terms I think it might be easier/cheaper to launch an MVP in PHP with a sensible framework (like Yii) and then migrate to Python + web2py or Django for the "real" product.
I prefer Python, but it is hard to ignore job market statistics when considering what it might take to put together a team.
I'll go out on a limb and piss off a bunch of people in the process. I'll venture the thought that most PHP-only programmers are really bad programmers. Someone not formally educated in CS or having no experience in a variety of languages (and paradigms) before adopting PHP will probably be "challenged" as a programmer in more than one way. I have a feeling that, because of the nature of the language, a larger percentage of Python programmers are really good "traditional" programmers with a good balance between theoretical and practical knowledge.
That's pretty much how it is, but I believe the why is largely to do with the large amount of bad PHP learning aides available for free on the internet (I'm looking at you, w3schools).
That being said, I have met (and work with) some "PHP first" programmers who are genuinely great programmers, and who get how to write clean, reusable code. "I learnt in PHP" isn't a blanket euphemism for "I'm a horrible programmer".
Your analysis of the benefits doesn't seem to be very favorable to PHP, so I am still confused as to how you came to the conclusion that using anything other than PHP is basically impossible. Again I feel the need to ask, what is it you are choosing PHP for? We were making a language choice for building a large web app that is the basis of the company. PHP rated terribly for that purpose. Setting up a blog for someone would presumably have PHP rating much better.
>In general terms I think it might be easier/cheaper to launch an MVP in PHP with a sensible framework (like Yii) and then migrate to Python + web2py or Django for the "real" product.
Why do you think that?
>I'll venture the thought that most PHP-only programmers are really bad programmers
A common problem I see in these kinds of discussions is engineers. Yup, you and me. In my case it took me years to move away from being a typical clueless egocentric engineer. I am sure I still am to some extent. Whatever is left pales in comparison to my younger self.
What made the change? Business. And the realities of the insanely simple business equation coupled with actually launching and running them with my own money.
There's a huge difference between holding a cat by the tail and watching someone else do it from afar. Huge.
Where I am going with this is that we (engineers and technical folk) tend to focus on, and talk about, FEATURES almost at the expense of BENEFITS. The reality of business is that the value of the former pales in comparison with that of the latter.
I love Python. However, when faced with having to do a benefits analysis it is almost impossible to not choose PHP these days. Liking it has nothing to do with making the choice. Well, it shouldn't.
I wish engineers could see what they sound like from the vantage point of a business person. You see this all the time at pitch events. There's an absolutely abysmal difference between presentations from "virgin" engineers and those who have had even a few business scars.