I have just started learning PHP but I have seen a lot of people bashing the language on their blogs. I also read on digg that PHP was used for the majority of YouTube. That should say alot for the program.. Please see below. "The article is a bit misleading, the YouTube frontend which accounts for about 90% of the use of the site (more people watch videos than upload them) is written in PHP. The backend is written in Python. The backend handles uploads and command line access into FFMPEG for screen caps and video conversions. You can even see here: http://youtube.com/my_videos.php clearly, that's PHP. If you guys want to look at scalability, take a look at Yahoo! They use PHP for almost everything and they're the #1 website online. Even Digg uses PHP.... I personally use a custom PHP framework for most of the code in my applications. I use a mix of MySQL and PostgreSQL for the database platform, Memcache to soften the load on the database(s), MogileFS to handle file replication/clusters, and either Perl or Python for file uploads, since PHP is absolutely terrible for large file uploads. This setup scales well and has worked well for myself and my clients for years." what do you think?
People love to hate. PHP is just fine, and can do nearly anything you'll need. A lot of big sites are written in PHP... Facebook, Imageshack, last.fm, eBay (partly), etc... Python is nice too, Google uses it in some parts. So it's up to you really. If you're only planning to make websites, then I'd go with PHP. But if besides that, you also want to create desktop apps or games in the future, then I'd go with Python.
Haven't stated what it is you want to do with the language after you learn it. Don't base your decision on what people are bashing a language over. Seek out the language that does what you need it to do. If its a job, odds are either one will get you work. PHP more immediate work. Python might would pay more since there are fewer programmers for it.
Without a shadow of a doublt learn PHP, the documentation is second to none, the community is great, you can do almost anything with the extensions; couple it with linux and you've got by far the best web programming language out there. Once you learned PHP, then concider a (partial) move to python if you can justify it, python's a language and a half especially when coupled with xul. ps: facebook is php aswell, so's stumble and the like. ubuntu 6.06 LT, apache 2, php 5.2.4+, mysql 5 - thats the winning combo
Different tools for different jobs. Python is a multipurpose language, php is web only (anyone that mentions gtk with a straight face is impressive) The facebook example of php for web, but python to handle long running ffmpeg requests is a good example of using languages suitable for each task.
I'm with able, PHP and Python are different tools for different jobs. Learn PHP if you want to learn web development.