But Python and Ruby, among other languages, are also available for Web programming, and you can get things done quickly in them as well. Plus, you can do some t

But Python and Ruby, among other languages, are also available for Web programming, and you can get things done quickly in them as well. Plus, you can do some things in them much more easily than in PHP. I hold out great hope for these languages, but they are still very new. (Technically, the languages themselves are as old as PHP or older, but their popularity in the web problem space is new.) Some of the advantages of being old are easy to appreciate, like the fact that PHP is so easy to deploy that most cheap shared hosts deploy it as a matter of course, and the fact that it runs really fast. Others are more subtle. There are enormous user communities centered around user-focused, PHP-based toolkits like Wordpress and Drupal. Ruby and Python just don't have these yet, but that may just be a question of time. The Drupal community is now huge, but it took nearly eight years to get to this point. There are a few Ruby and Python-based projects which aim to be the equivalent of Drupal (everybody wave to the Insoshi folks!), but they're only a year or two old. Which is too bad, because Ruby is so much more satisfying than PHP. The future cannot arrive soon enough.