Ask HN: Bet the farm. Python or PHP?

1. Extensive support of libraries and frameworks. 2. Excellent community. 3. Rapidly develop and deploy. 4. Capable of scaling quite well.

Python and PHP score well on all four of these points.

I am about to embark on building a web app; calendar/scheduling/notifications with some social networking and people matching/search functionality. The site will be highly configurable/maintainable by it's community from establishing/interacting within groups to tweeking page layouts.

So far, I have chosen this stack:

Ubuntu, Apache (dynamic content), thttpd (static content), MySql, memcached.

I'm quite experienced in Perl but just a beginner in both Python and PHP yet I am determined to use either Python or PHP in my latest project.

I'm looking for the pros/cons and any other tips from the HN community. I'm at a fork in the road and I guess that once I make this choice, it'll be quite difficult switching after the initial framework is built out.

I'm not sure if I have/haven't given enough information to go on but I would appreciate everyone's input, not only on PHP or Python but on any of the other technologies I have chosen as well as critiquing my (currently vaporware) web app.

So which is it; PHP or Python?

By more responsive, you mean from rendering the html/css/js sent back to the browser? Or more responsive when connecting to the back-end MySql database?

If you could elaborate, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

>calendar/scheduling/notifications with some social networking

Why?

More and more web apps are coming out with social networking tied in, and very few of them succeed BECAUSE they have social networking tied in. Socializing a site is a bit more than giving people profile pages and enabling them the ability to "friend" people, at least that's how I look at it.

So my question to you is this: how are you planning to make the social aspect of your site actually work? How are you going to make the ad hoc benefits of social networking replicate to an online presence? Will people actually benefit from socializing, or are they just going to have friends who they will have the extraneous ability to leave comments about?

What are your feelings as a beginner in each language? Have you found any little design decisions that leave you scratching your head, or make you start cursing loudly at the computer? Have you built anything with them? If so, did you run into any issues that you feel were a result of the language?

I'm a bit of a hedonist, but if I were in your situation, I'd probably try to pick the one that was the most fun to work with. As you say, once you've started building, it won't be (or maybe for you it will be?) as easy to switch, and you probably don't want to figure out that you hate coding in whatever you've chosen while trying to finish your web app.

When in a variant of your situation (PHP/a PHP framework versus Python/Django), I chose Python. I'm not you, so we may have totally different tastes and may have come to a different conclusion given the facts. I've been pretty happy with my choice, though.

Thus far, I've built very simple pieces of PHP such as logins, maintaining sessions, writing/reading to/from MySql. My one concern with PHP is the overwhelming "alphabet soup" of functions.

I haven't done anything web-facing with Python just yet, just using it to; parse files, some socket programming - basically getting a feel for the language.

So far, I couldn't say I've run into any issues resulting directly from the languages themselves.

Thanks for the input.