By this logic, why not Java, C++, Rust, Go, C#?

They’re all web-capable and blow the doors off PHP, Python, etc.

Yes all of those would be way better options than Python and probably PHP. Well maybe not C++. You'd have to be pretty crazy to have web developers writing security sensitive code in C++.

The "blame our co-founder for the choice" bit is exactly what that graph about the cost of defects vs how early they are fixed is talking about.

If they had just picked Go or Java right at the start they wouldn't have had to expend all this engineering effort to get to a still-not-very-good solution.

This thread arose from a person that said "Use PHP", as an argument to using Python. It's a silly argument.

It was just a silly remark about the snail-like performance of Python.

Another silly thing:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I'm not really seeing what's silly about what you're linking. I'm seeing Java blowing the doors off of PHP, which matches my previous assertion.

Much better comparison for typical web load, what this discussion is about.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

Java wins as expected, but a typical setup with Spring versus the typical top PHP frameworks isn't blowing the doors off. Typical Python + Django is far behind, as someone pointed out.

However what we can see in the diagrams is that ORM layers, regardless of language, are more expensive than what most people realize, even for a compiled language like Java.

Why PHP wins is because it is fast enough, compared to other dynamic languages, but is a better fit for web development than Java or other compiled languages.

In the link you provided PHP is 53% as fast as Spring. I would argue that’s an insane performance reduction.

If Python weren’t fast “enough”, would it be used to power so many successful web backends?

That is for spring-webflux, is that a typical spring set up for web today?

I haven’t coded spring for a few years now, but I was thinking about the traditional spring setup that most use and that is comparable.

You can of course use Python successfully, my argument is that it is easier with PHP, not that it is not possible with Python.

It is a similar argument compared with Java, it is easier with PHP than Java in a web context. Java has other benefit thats fits better for web services IMHO, general higher performance is one.

C#, Java, C++ need application servers, no?

"Serverless" scales infinitely due to its simpler request/response lifecycle.

Serverless is too overloaded a term to have any meaning. I'm not really seeing how Python or PHP "scales infinitely" in any way that C#, Java, C++ couldn't.

PHP is usually easier to scale because it just a matter of how many webservers. e.g. apache or nginx, you choose to deploy. This also possible with other platforms, but can be a bit trickier to get right.

For large PHP setups it is usually the number of database connections that is the limiting factor, however that is why historically the replicated MySQL databases was such a good fit for PHP, thus only creating a limit for writes on the master.

> For large PHP setups it is usually the number of database connections that is the limiting factor,

For pretty much every modern programming language, IO is the bottleneck over everything else.

To save you some time, there are practically no metrics in which I think PHP beats another programming language other than maturity, and even then, not really.

Php needs an application server as well.

Yet YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Robinhood, DoorDash, and Lyft backend were originally primarily written in Python. What’s funny is that nobody can really deny Python is slow yet somehow the biggest websites in the world were written in it. More proof that Worse Is Better?

In the early stages:

Speed of development is far more important than optimizing CPU usage.

You can fake your way to fast responses with good caching, but there's not really many ways to fake having the best features.

It blows my mind how quickly PHP7.4 processes even shitty code.