I specifically mentioned dealing with crappy hosts. PHP's biggest strength is that it is available to almost everyone for cheap. Unfortunately most of those che

I specifically mentioned dealing with crappy hosts. PHP's biggest strength is that it is available to almost everyone for cheap. Unfortunately most of those cheap hosts don't support sane extensions. And you certainly aren't going to get custom ones on there. Or even a recent version of PHP. Python has some similar issues. Ensuring that an end-user application written in Python is going to have access the the appropriate version of Python with the packages you need is still a challenge. Asking Joe user to install virtualenv and Python 3.3 is not viable. Currently I'm working on an app that uses Python, but is written in C and embeds Python for some of the cross-platform components.