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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

In the context of the parent comment I'd argue that the differences are insignificant. Xuzz argued that PHP is simpler because you don't need to know the ecosystem. Which I countered by showing a basic example of Python which doesn't depend on the ecosystem (like frameworks, package managers or version control).

Besides that, I don't think knowing HTTP headers or understanding significance of trailing newlines is required to write CGI scripts. You only need to know that you need those three 'magic' lines in the front of your scripts. Similarly like you need to know that in php you need <?php ... ?> around your script.

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But I never needed to worry about those three lines in PHP, to a new user that is important. To you and I they come naturally.

PHP "is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML" [1]. Python "lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively" [2]. They can both do the task of the other, but the upstart time for a developer to handle the task of making a web app is smaller for PHP.

I've never taken the non-framework approach with python for anything significant, but how does it handle cookies, GET and POST fields, sessions, and file uploads? In PHP you'd have $_COOKIE, $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, and $_FILES as built-in global variables.

Are these differences still insignificant?

[1] http://php.net/ [2] http://python.org/

Python has a `cgi` module that does most of the superglobal stuff for you.

But, er. Does this really matter? Yes, you can get "hello world" in PHP with one line of not-PHP. You can also get "hello world" in Python + Flask with seven lines, and you'll get half a dozen extremely nice features for free that you can learn about as you go.

Arguing about what stack has the simplest way to build from total scratch is a sad race to the bottom. I'd rather be making the point that rich Web development can be easy, not that cobble-your-own-thing-together-with-duct-tape can be easy.

The first poster in this thread made the statement: "If I need a quick dynamic page on my server, it's much easier to do this in PHP than in Python or Ruby."

So yes, it really does matter in the context of this thread. On the whole I agree with your philosophy that frameworks are there for a reason: you get many features for almost nothing.

But sometimes you just don't need a framework, you need something quick-and-dirty that just works.

But even something quick and dirty is longer than "hello world". I've written a couple pretty dinky things with Flask, and the minuscule overhead of typing `import Flask` was definitely worth having e.g. a solid template language and XSS protection ready to go.

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