PHP vs PYTHON: Battle to get Ahead in Web Development Race

The technical arena is filled with programming languages. Today developers have multiple options for an app, website, or software development. The two languages we are going to discuss are the strongest in each of their domain.

Why this Debate?

Now, if both of the languages are strongest in their domain, so why we need a clear-cut opinion about them, or what is the need to choose one?

We agree that for the time being, whether it is PHP or Python, both are the most popular server-side languages. And choosing one over the other has always been a tough call! But here comes the term "requirements", yes! It depends on the requirement of the business and the need of the hour that helps you decide which language would be suitable for your project.

According to Datanyze, PHP far exceeds the number of websites developed until Feb 2020. Still, this language, which at a point of time ruled the roost, is witnessing a downfall since its counterpart i.e., Python, has emerged as an alternative for web development.

So, you may think that if both the languages are shoulder to shoulder in the competition of availing better web development options, which one gets the final edge. Further, so must be wondering what is ‘web development’?

According to Wikipedia, "web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an Intranet (a private network)." So, whether you are surfing or developing a plain text page or a complex web app to aid your business or social network services, all of these and much more comes under the umbrella term web development.

Now, as web development seems to be a crucial facet to mark the presence of any business on the digital platform and help it to ace its competitors. But the selection of one language in this battle of Python over PHP solely can't be based on the growth rate; certainly, there are other reasons which a business or a developer should look after before making a decision; well, not to worry if that sounds a bit confusing to you, Biz4Group will undoubtedly help you chose one as per your business needs, and as we say, first thing first, let's get familiar with the two terminologies in hand;

The three Letters : 'P H P' and are they more than that?

PHP has a recursive acronym i.e., it is expanded as 'Hypertext Preprocessor'. It is a general "server-side" scripting language used in web development. Well, that said, PHP is much more than that; it is largely responsible for creating the dynamism on the websites in terms of webpages, content, or images.

PHP can also be used with Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), which can be deployed on most of the web servers and operating systems. PHP comes bundled in the most widely used LAMP architecture; here, it is commonly signified by 'P'. As posted by Andy Ide on Netcraft, as of January 2013, more than 240 million websites were using PHP, and it was installed on 2.1 million web-servers.

Well, that was a brief intro of PHP, now let's get familiar with its counterpart; i.e.

The Python Overview

Technically, Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language that has dynamic semantics to primarily aid for web and mobile app development. It is most likely used by those segments of developers who are in the field of Rapid Application Development as it supports dynamic typing and binding options.

You can't take lightly a language which is backing a stock exchange system, yes! You heard it right; the web-oriented transaction system of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is powered by Python. Apart from being just a scripting language, it is widely used to solve scientific equations, save data, process text, images or display numbers, and much more. Well, apart from that, Django and Flask are the popularly used Python frameworks used to create web applications.

Well, those were a brief description of both the languages we are going to deal with, so let's put them into the arena and see who wins the battle of;

PHP vs. PYTHON: Head to Head Comparison

Ease of Installation

The installation process of PHP is pretty much simple as compared to Python. It can be easily installed and run on windows, mac, and Linux operating systems from a variety of options available by the hosting sites.

Whereas installing Python can be a little tedious at first due to various packages, because of which it takes a bit more time on installation.

Winner: PHP

Ease of Learning

For any programmer or developer, language is the most important factor to start with. They keep in mind that easier the language would be, the much easier it would be their task to handle else more complex language may take a lot of time in understanding and having the grasp of syntax only.

Python is a general-purpose programming language that can be learned quickly, even for a novice programmer. The python code and its syntax are so simple to use and easy-to-write that most of the programmers prefer it as their first choice to develop any application.

On the other hand, PHP was designed to create simple pages, but lately, a lot of complexities have grown for developers to continue with it. The PHP community is surely providing all sorts of help for the programmers, but as said, syntaxes and constructs of Python are much easier to be understood.

Winner: Python

Community Support

There's huge community support for PHP, as it has been for quite a long period in the market. It is particularly used to develop web applications as an outcome of which there has been larger community support worldwide for PHP.

On the other hand, Python also acing up with PHP in terms of community support, as there are developers and programmers across the world that are continuously developing Python applications.

The reason which has highlighted the use of Python among the coding community was its use by Google for YouTube. While in contrast to it, we shall not forget that the world's largest social networking platform, Facebook has been written using PHP as the primary backend.

Winner: A Tie between the two

Library Support

At this spot, PHP lags behind Python. Python manages its all packages using pip (i.e., pip installs Python); it makes applications simple and easy to use with the help of different libraries. Many developers and startups are turning towards Python just because of its library support, as it features some of the finest libraries used for Machine Learning such as ScikitLearn, Keras, TensorFlow, etc.

Whereas, library management of PHP isn't that strong as compared to Python, because Python has a bundle of packages to deal with.

Winner: Python

Environment Management

While building any application, the environment plays an important role. In this case, if you are well versed with tools like Docker and have used them as a container to build your application, you might not need an environment manager.

But, in contrast to that, talking about environments available with these two languages, Python again has the upper hand. The virtual environment provided by Python, known as Virtualenv, is a type of system used to install multiple versions of Python. It is one of those virtual environments that have been maintained for a decade, thus providing excellent support.

PHP, on the other hand, does not have such a feature. The developers of PHP suggest using contains such as what we have discussed above i.e., Docker. There happens to be a virtual environment of PHP called the virtPHP, but the PHP developers no longer maintain such projects.

Winner: Python

Pricing

Both of these languages are completely free and open source. Both come without any cost attached to them. PHP and Python altogether win over the other paid web frameworks.

Winner: Tie between the Two

Speed

Speed becomes an important factor when we say of performance; the older version of PHP was quite slow and used to take a lot of time. While since its new release PHP 7x, it has become very fast, it has now become three times as compared to a typical Python program.

Now, there are various aspects of a programming language that is responsible for slowing down its speed, such as database and network queries, reading a lot of information from disk are the factors that contribute in reduction if speed.

On the other hand, it is to be noted that, no matter what languages you are using, if the said language cannot guarantee you a fast web app or can build you an application of utmost performance, it is of no use. Biz4Group helps you tackle those existing problems behind your applications lagging speed and slow performance, and help you speed them up to scale-up your business growth.

Winner: PHP

Debugging

Whenever programmers and developers start building an application, most of the things work well, but most of them don't. So, the only solution for any failure is debugging the code and finding out the pit hole.

Python provides you with a powerful debugger called the PDB (or Python Debugger). It is easy to use and is a well-documented debugger. On the other hand, PHP uses the XDebug package for debugging. Both of these debuggers provide with the common debugging features, and at this point also both of the languages are on the same line.

Winner: A tie between the two

Documentation

Documentation is an important part when it comes to dealing with a new project; good documentation can help sail you through the projects or applications you are developing.

In this context, both PHP and Python have a well-documented page with comments, but the documentation of PHP is still from the older version of it i.e., the comments start to load from the very older version of it. While on the other hand, Python's documentation is written in a less conversational tone, that some developers find it easy to go while to others that may sound little technical. However, PHP's outdated documentation makes it loose one point here.

Winner- Python

PHP vs. PYTHON: The Final Verdict

As we have gone step by step to weigh both the languages on various scales. Finally, we have come down to make our final evaluation, while both Python 3 and PHP 7 are excellent in their respective domains. But to choose one, we will go with Python!

Well, it also depends on the need of the user. The ability of in-house developers, no matter which way your mind swings, we at Biz4Group are there to support you with our experienced team of in-house developers and programmers to build a scalable product for your business to grow. The only key out there is to start building without swaying away, just get in touch and connect with us right away.