Ouch!!! [LWN.net]

Ouch!!!

Posted Jan 11, 2007 19:38 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: Ouch!!! by moxfyre
Parent article: Optaros publishes an open source catalog

The technical superiority of some language/software is actually not among the most important factors when deciding on tools for a project or your company. One of the most important things to consider is the supply of programmers who know the language. Measured with that, Python is not even close to PHP. While I'm sure among LWN readers Python might be seen as mainstream some five years ago, in my opinion in "the world out there" it is still not quite mainstream (although usable), while PHP certainly is one of the most commonly known languages today.

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quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 1:00 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, it's true, there are a lot more PHP programmers than Python programmers.

But if you eliminate the PHP programmers whose code you wouldn't trust to put on your
server, the numbers are much closer.

I say this as someone who does a lot of programming in PHP and almost none in
Python. (But an increasing amount in Ruby.) And as someone who wants to hire more
programmers.

quantity vs quality

Posted Jan 12, 2007 6:08 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

True :-) Probably Optaron didn't consider this angle...

Actually, I have myself once considered this too: If you have access to Python programmers, at least until now they tended to be 95% gurus, whereas with PHP or Java or Visual Basic the competence range of programmers is much more different. So you can also (and many hard core hackers do this on purpose) choose tools on a basis that you want to select some particular community.