What to choose between two technologies PHP and Python as well as want to see which technology wins in PHP vs Python? It is a big question that always strikes in the mind of beginners in the web development domain. It is also a big question for those thinking to develop an outstanding web application. The reason is both of these languages are highly popular for web development purposes and have their features and benefits choosing between both are hard to decide. Therefore, to help those new starters in making a quick decision we have described lots of aspects of both.
Keep Reading…
2019 was the year of progressive web apps and highly interactive websites. It was the year that had completely focused on responsive and customer-centric applications. As an outcome company across the globe focused on choosing a programming language that is highly suitable and the best match for making websites responsive and flexible. However, the year 2020 lots of other web development trends are expected like AI and animation technologies.
Mobile and web applications will dominate the consumer market in 2020 as well. In this way, two of the most popular coding languages are worth for money. The battle between PHP vs Python has become a hot potato in today’s competitive market scenario among the developers, clients and project managers as well. Both of these languages are highly recommended and popular for custom web development services.
Meanwhile, professional web development companies can help you unlock the templates, 3rd-party libraries of these open-source and popular frameworks. Cross-platform libraries, globally-adaptive RESTful APIs are responsible to streamline web development. But, the question raised before remains the same for clients, developers and project managers as well.
About the Programming
PHP is and will be high in demand for developing dynamic and interactive web apps and many other different solutions. Therefore, we can compare it with HTML like codes. While Python comes to meet all-goals of developers offering them lots of customization options with great flexibility. In this way, going ahead with Python will offer the functional features you must require in your web development project.
Know the factors to consider before doing comparison PHP vs Python:
The programming language you choose your web development project should meet the several factors. The important features and comparison between PHP and Python are mentioned below.
- Ease of Installation
- CMS and frameworks
- PHP vs Python for web development
- Learning Curve
- Debugging tools and profiling
- Easy Syntax
- Popularity
- Efficiency
- Application Speed
- Library Support
- Environment Management
Ease of Installation
Installing PHP is not a big challenge. You can easily install PHP on Windows, Linux and macOS as well. Additionally, with a minimal fee, you will get a wide range of shared hosting websites. If you want to apply the updates to the existing version then it is easy to make it done and you will not need a new version to install in your system.
Installing new packages is not sufficient to update Python. To apply the updates you will need a new version in your system. Additionally, the situation is worse when we talk about Windows. To get started with Windows you will need Chocolatey (a Windows package manager). However, there is no issue you will face installing Python in Linux.
CMS and frameworks
As a developer, we think that you understand what a framework is. In simple language, we can say that it is a set of different libraries that assists in the development of different task-based web solutions. Available modules, libraries and community support in a framework assist developers to create unique and the best suitable web applications. It is more affordable and quicker if you want to develop a website from scratch.
While talking about PHP no one can deny that it has a big set of libraries and functional tools. They assist developers to develop highly flexible and fully-fledged mobile and web applications at pocket-friendly prices. The frameworks like Symfony and Laravel as some of the most popular and globally used PHP frameworks, which provide huge documentation. There is huge support you can get for both of the frameworks on the web.
Python is one of the most powerful and versatile frameworks. The frameworks options with Python are limited however; some Django and Flask are the most popular frameworks having an increasing number of users and multiple projects across the globe.
Python is great and widely used web development language that is:
- Robust,
- Well-designed,
- High-level,
- Object-oriented,
- And perfectly readable.
PHP vs Python for web development
In the present competitive marketplace, choosing a language to meet end-to-end web development needs is a must need. The main motto of going with such a solution is to minimize the overall development cost of the project along with implementing all development features and reusability to deliver the project without time delay. Both PHP and Python are equal at this platform.
Learning Curve
When we talk about PHP, then we can see that lots of developers including freelancers are offering PHP development services globally. Why? The reason is learning PHP is easy and favoured over Python as it has big community support to resolve the issues quickly and easily.
PHP vs Python both of the technologies are object-oriented programming languages that run different operating systems. They both have huge IDE support and dynamically typed.
One more thing that makes the learning curve of PHP better than Python is that it is an old language. Due to this developers can also get large documentation of PHP available online freely or at a small cost. Its community has invested big efforts to make things easy and flexible in the web development domain. They have made the development much friendly and easier for developers.
Python also has a wide array of new starters and learners however, its learning curve is not slighter than PHP. As PHP offers fluency in syntax and different tools to develop proper functional code to make the development smooth is not available in Python. Syntax of Python is typical and not similar to other coding languages.
Due to this Python is tough to learn and the beginners make mistakes in formatting and syntax. So, in the highly learnable, easily learnable and simplest language between PHP vs Python PHP wins the race.
Python is equipped with a wide range of built-in data and ready to use data-types. The big challenge in using Python is that it is not easy to select the tool for doing a specific job. But don’t worry, it is not hard to resolve this issue.
PHP vs Python Speed
There are lots of things that are responsible to speed up the application, so, don’t think that it is just a programming language. Slow database queries are also responsible for slowing down the coding language. However, in the speed matter, PHP wins in the race of PHP vs Python speed. The core PHP team has worked well to boost the speed of PHP, and with the new version PHP 7, they got success. PHP restarts every application on every user request, that’s why resource sharing becomes complex.
However, this is not easy with Python, and not all the web apps need to restart the entire app on every request. So, if you are going to develop a new web application and seeking for faster speed and improved performance, you must ask it from the professionals. PHP succeeds here.
Debugging tools and profiling
In PHP, developers can easily find lots of tools from Google for debugging their web development project. It offers lots of tools to developers easily and an extensive development ecosystem. This is the main cynosure why developers prefer PHP over Python as they get access to lots of tools for debugging.
While Python is never an easy way to move on with the coding syntax and writing codes. It doesn’t mean that PHP is easy to implement for all size projects, but it is not too much complex. Because doing programming for the large size projects are difficult in any language.
Easy Syntax
It is one of the other reasons to choose a language for the web development project. This is also the main and starting point for the developers to know the syntax of the language. Because beginners always try to go with a language that has easy syntax. Syntax-error free programming makes the language more popular and useful for developers.
In PHP it is not possible to write syntax-error free codes that create restrictions for the beginners as well as the experienced programmers to find out the issues in the build. While Python provides better coding readability to the developers. PHP implicates more issues in the syntactical aspects of a language than Python.
Popularity
Which is more popular between PHP vs Python? While choosing a programming language for web development developers, program managers and clients make it sure which would be the best and widely used language for their project. The fact is PHP is superior in the web development market as it empowers more than 75% websites across the internet including the big IT online platforms such as Wikipedia, Flickr and Yahoo.
We can’t miss the name of the top social media site Facebook was initially developed using PHP. It provides a big set of SDK libraries to its developers. We can say it that Facebook is a full-fledged PHP framework having lots of templates and features required for developing an eye-catching PHP web development.
When we talk about the popularity of Python then it increased drastically when developers at Google elected it for developing their applications. Since, then they used it in their well-known applications such as Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube and Instagram as well. So, in terms of popularity, we can say that both languages are on the same platform. Both of them can be seen in the world’s top software and web platforms.
Efficiency
We know that offering a clean-code is one of the most important jobs of a programming language. Clean code always increases the memory usage and performance of the system. All these are considered as technical aspects that are hidden from the consumers and eye from the users but we can’t ignore them as they have a great impact on the product’s acceptability in the market.
A slow application can never be the choice of the end-users because users don’t want to wait to get desired results on the web. If an application is slow then it can’t get positive reviews from its users, especially when the end-users have other similar options available in the market.
So, to get clean and well-planned code that can offer more accurate and efficient results, Python wins the race from PHP. Python is well-structured, and the best path to deliver out-of-the-box and unique products to the consumer market. While PHP is behind Python in the trait of PHP vs Python performance.
Library Support
One of the other aspects in PHP vs Python is library support most importantly when it comes to web applications supported by machine learning. Python has lots of machine learning libraries such as Scikit Learn, Theano, Kera, TensorFlow etc. While Packagist is the only machine learning library in PHP. This is also a big factor where Python gets more points than PHP.
Such libraries assist developers to integrate them with their web development project enabling quicker development and reusability that save time and offer in time delivery of the project. In terms of library, support Python surpasses PHP.
Environment Management
It is also a vital aspect that should be considered for developing applications in case you don’t want to depend on containers. But, if this is not the condition then it is vital for you to look after the library versions and installed language of the application. In this way, developers can manage different versions of Python by multiple systems like Virtalenv that enables installing switching and managing between different versions of Python.
HP also stands here as it has an original environment manager that is termed as VirtPHP. PHP developer community recommend utilizing containers as well. Hence, Python again ahead of PHP in this regard.
Wrap up
Discussion is not over yet between PHP vs Python. It is very tough to decide which is the best language for your website development project. Both, PHP and Python have lots of features and benefits for developing web applications. Well, selecting between both will depend on your needs.
If your team already know PHP then PHP would be the best bet for you and if your application needs great Unicode support then you should go with Python.
Best of luck for your new web development project!
Author Bio
NIKUNJ SHINGALA
Nikunj Shingala is a CEO and co-founder at Webs Optimization Software Solution which is successfully delivering services in the realm of UI/UX design, web app development, mobile app development, and enterprise solution. He’s enthusiastic blogger and his writing interest includes mobile and web development technologies, startup ideas and strategies.
