Right, I think your final sentence gets at the crux of what I'm talking about. I have 0 trust in PHP that my script really 'works' -- however, very often I hav

Right, I think your final sentence gets at the crux of what I'm talking about. I have 0 trust in PHP that my script really 'works' -- however, very often I have a lot more confidence in being able to get to something that 'seems to work' within 30 seconds. Whereas, in Python I am pretty much guaranteed to spend 5-15 minutes on it. As for web work. I actually just did try "how to tail a file in php" and "how to tail a file in python". On the PHP side I instantly saw this stackoverflow question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1102229/how-to-watch-a-file-write-in-php http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1102229/how-to-watch-a-fi... which links to this: http://code.google.com/p/php-tail/ http://code.google.com/p/php-tail/ Ability to tail small and big files for updates using PHP and AJAX. Includes the ability to grep results for a specific keyword. - Fully documented - Fully customizable - Updates the page with new information without a page refresh - Change GREP keyword / invert on the fly without a page refresh - Uses JQuery / JQueryUI libraries - Simple to use UI - Automatic scrolling when required (if a user scrolls up, the automatic scroll is disabled until the user scrolls to the bottom again) Wow, that is pretty amazing. If someone just HAPPENS to be looking for a quick tail through a web-browser, with grep functionality, this is a drop-in solution. It's not what I needed, but this is my whole point about community-size. As it gets larger and larger, there is a greater and greater possibility that just what you need is 30 seconds away. It would literally take you hours to do all of the above in Python.