I get the feeling you aren't very familiar with Python. Actually I'm hard-pressed to name a popular language in which writing a string to a file is particularly difficult.

You don't have to check for errors in Python; most functions raise exceptions on error, rather than letting your program continue with a known bad state.

The `if __name__ == "__main__":` pattern is a cute trick to distinguish a module from a file being run directly. It's not strictly necessary; just a nice habit. It's spiritually similar to the checks you have to do in PHP library files to make sure they're not being run directly.

You don't have to pass `self` around. You just list it as a parameter. There are design reasons for this, it's a tradeoff, blah blah. Think of it as the price you pay for getting to type 'def' instead of 'function'.

I'm not a C programmer, and I doubt many people writing web applications are, so how does wrapping C functions with C names help me? Are `'b' in 'abc'` and `len('foo')` that difficult to understand?

I like to think I've covered my reasons for disliking PHP well enough by now.

Okay. You're not the target audience of this article, then.