Re:Ask HN: Which language do you prefer for back end develop...
by IpV8 on Sunday January 28, 2018 @09:49PM
(#16255001)
I've done php, ruby, go, c++, c, java, javascript, and python and I must say I prefer python the most for generic server side stuff. Super well organized and documented. Just the right amount of abstraction. I like c++ for lower level stuff, where python starts to fall off. Go is growing on me but its still so much easier to be productive in C++ in most realistic situations. I use C only when I can't use C++, which is rare.
I converted from PHP -> Python a long long time ago. But it was my first programming language.
PHP and Laravel is excellent. In particular, Laravel developers come across as very intelligent to me. In the end though, Python has multi-spectrum dominance.
Post about Python's tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15957273
Python has Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/). It's 90% as good as Laravel. Which means it's very, very good.
But the thing with Python is it owns PHP when you're doing non-website stuff. If you can be convinced to give up Laravel (it may be hard), Python is easily the best choice.
Python has PEP standards PEP8 (code style) and PEP257 (code docs) long before PHP PSR's became a thing.
Scraping. Normalizing data. Python can handle big data sets. Machine Learning/AI.
Has documentation via Sphinx. Here's an example of one of my projects: https://cihai.git-pull.com. Here's an example of generated API docs: https://cihai.git-pull.com/en/latest/api.html.
The nature of being "Pythonic" spreads into open source code, and later into teams, so the libraries you pull in have a familiar style.
OOP is implemented better in python. That rubs off onto the quality of the libraries and how enjoyable they are to implement.
In my opinion, once you get a hang of Python, it's much easier to read than PHP.