I've been having a similar problem with the added difficulty* that I don't do development as my full-time job (yet) and have been coding mostly for developer co

I've been having a similar problem with the added difficulty* that I don't do development as my full-time job (yet) and have been coding mostly for developer contests and hackathons. So when I start something that has a deadline in 24 hours or just a few days, I can either fall back to PHP to get something going fast or spend most of my time just learning a new language. So, I have been typically going with PHP… I've found that the important thing is to take the time to set yourself up with the minimum environment that can get something, anything going in a different language: that means whatever is needed to print something on a page and get some logic working with GET and POST parameters. Because the nice thing with PHP is that it's so easy to write a single file that displays text on a page, or that responds to POST and GET parameters with some logic behind it. If I started with Ruby for example, I wouldn't know how to do this basic thing. (granted, with Rails and Heroku, this is easy) My plan is to make Python my generalist programming language and I started to look at Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/ http://flask.pocoo.org/) for that reason: it's a mini-framework that doesn't take long to learn how to do these simple things. I can then play with it for simple things. *though it can make things easier since I can just work on whatever I want in whatever language I want :)