When it came time to start putting code to paper at CrashCorp I was faced with the decision of choosing both a language and a platform. After 11 years of coding solely in PHP I’d grown tired of the language and, to some extent, the community (not the people, who are great, but the way the community is organized).
First the language. What makes PHP, as a language, awesome is also what makes it horrible to work with, which is that it’s not really a language, but rather a giant plugin architecture for exposing lower level libraries in a high level fashion. Most of the language that developers use are, in fact, thin wrappers around popular C functions (curl, mysql, gd, etc.). Most of the time these libraries’ functions are simply exposed as-is. Anyone who’s coded curl in C will feel right at home while using curl from PHP. The problem with this is it leads to wildly inconsistent API’s.
Another touchy problem with the language is actually a byproduct of the way PHP, the core language, is managed. It’s, essentially, designed by committee. Anyone who’s ever tried to design a large scale anything knows how problematic this can be. The second problem with this approach is that nobody from on high is setting any kind of recognizable standards. PEAR has its standards and PHP has its standards, while everyone else codes however they damn well please. This leads to SPL classes being more Java style, while PEAR classes look a lot different (e.g. ArrayObject vs. HTTP_Request2).
The ultimate problem of this committee approach is that, before a feature can be integrated, the whole committee has to be on board. This is especially true for core language functionality. For instance, PHP just recently got anonymous functions and short-hand array slicing. Don’t get me started on namespaces in PHP.
I know quite a few core PHP coders personally and, from what I understand, they have a number of problems when evolving PHP. Besides the committee issues and the fact that extensions are coded by a few thousand different people, there’s the fact that PHP is installed on just about every machine on the planet so backwards incompatible changes wreak havoc on code everywhere.
At the end of the day I was tired of PHP’s inconsistent language syntax and waiting for more modern language features. Enter Python.
Python’s approach to creating a language is about as completely opposite as you can get from PHP. First, and foremost, Python is lead by Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum. The result is that the language’s development takes its cues from a single person with a consistent longterm vision of how things should be. Guido and the core Python coders set standards, via PEP’s, on everything from how common interfaces (e.g. DB’s) should work to coding standards (the infamous PEP8). Furthermore, practices Guido thinks are poor coding practices are simply not supported at the language level (e.g. there is no ++ operator nor can you do assignment in comparison operators).
The byproduct of this is that it permeates throughout the Python community. Due to the fact that Python has significant whitespace, combined with PEP8, you’d be hard pressed to find Python code that looks and feels drastically different between various projects.
But, overall, the thing I like most about Python is it explicitness. When you open a file in Python you know precisely what code is affecting that file. How many times I got burned by spaghetti require/include code I can’t tell you so this is a welcome addition.
On top of all of this Python has evolved significantly with regards to systems-level features. Want a daemon? Sure, just do import daemon \ daemon.daemonize(). Want threading? Sure, it’s all there. How about CLI option parsing? Just do from optparse import OptionParser.
Another thing I love about Python, is a religious adherence to KISS. You want namespaces? Fine the name of the file is the namespace. You want modules? Fine just replace / with . along with an __init__.py file and you’re good to go. Would you like to rename that function to something else? Fine just do new_func = old_func.
Finally, a stark difference between PHP and Python is that Guido, essentially, treats the developers as adults while PHP puts significant effort into protecting developers from themselves (I’m looking at you safe_mode). My favorite quote from Guido, while commenting on why Python doesn’t enforce private/protected/public variables was, “Hey, we’re all consenting adults here.” In addition to this, as my friend and Python hacker Mike Malone puts it, is that you can mangle whatever you want in Python. For instance, at runtime you can automatically extend class Foo from class Bar by doing Foo.__bases__ += Bar (Tip: This is especially handy for extending Django’s base User functionality). Much like UNIX, Python gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself, but at least hanging yourself is an option.
Overall, I’m really enjoying my decision to switch over and recommend you check out Python for your next project.
