Encodings are a non issue in PHP and the availability of web tools is much wider in php than for python. PHP matured in the sense that it from a wordpress type of hacky language to an almost decent language. It can be used properly if you know what you are doing (ie can scale really well for the web, can be secure, allows for good oop design, can be fast _for the web_, and has a wide range of supported packages, separation of concerns and so on).
> and the availability of web tools is much wider in php than for python.
If that was a metric for language quality, then Javascript would be undeniably the most perfect language ever designed by any intelligent species in the universe, judging by the number of frameworks.
> to an almost decent language
And now I would like to hear a good reason why I should use an "almost decent language", when I can use a decent one instead.
> It can be used properly if you know what you are doing
It doesn't matter what I do, the language still insists of having multiple modes of error handling, a massive amount of builtins all of which sit in my global namespace, it's configuration is still seperated between compiler flags, a system wide ini, and local config. The base deployment mode is still "dump files into folder and let CGI do the rest".
I am not saying that’s a metric of the language’s quality, nor am i saying that python is worse than php.
What i am saying is that the offering of tools has matured in php - instead of a basic template engine like smarty you now have “advanced” templating engines, packages and so on. Python has less packages but that can also he because python packages work better and there is no need for an overwhelming number of packages.
Regarding error handling that’s precisely one of the many issues with php. There are so many ways of doing the same thing that it becomes exhausting. And what many php devs do is they work around these issues either by endless hair splitting debates or a dubious amount of made up design patterns.
You shouldn't use php, i am totally against it. I think it’s as bad as it can affect your mental health. Just saying that by comparison to it’s previous versions it has come a long way.
However it does handle character encoding quite well and you can scale as much as you want to literally. Probably because thats too complex for the average php developer and it was left to core language developers which are pretty competent and experienced.
