Best Programming Language for Backend Web Development: PHP vs Python
<p>Something I get asked constantly by developers picking up their second or third language: PHP or Python for the backend?</p> <p>My answer used to be more confident than it should have been. I had a preference, I leaned on it, and I gave advice that was really just personal bias
Sahil Khurana Posted on May 25 • Originally published at innostax.com Best Programming Language for Backend Web Development: PHP vs Python # python # php # laravel # softwaredevelopment Something I get asked constantly by developers picking up their second or third language: PHP or Python for the backend? My answer used to be more confident than it should have been. I had a preference, I leaned on it, and I gave advice that was really just personal bias dressed up as guidance. After spending real time in both ecosystems — not just hello-world tutorials, actual production systems — my answer got more complicated and, I think, more useful. Here's what I actually know. A bit of context on where each language came from PHP started in 1994 as literally "Personal Home Page" — a set of CGI scripts Rasmus Lerdorf wrote to track visits to his online resume. That origin story matters more than people realize. PHP was never designed in a university or built as an academic exercise in language theory. It grew organically out of what developers actually needed to put dynamic content on websites. That pragmatism is baked into the language's DNA, for better and sometimes for worse. Python came from a different place entirely. Guido van Rossum built it as a teaching language with readability as a first principle. He wanted code that read close to plain English. That decision shapes everything about the language — the forced indentation, the clean syntax, the "one obvious way to do it" philosophy. It was never specifically a web language, which is why it ended up everywhere else too. Neither of these histories makes one language objectively better. But they explain a lot about why each one feels the way it does to work in. Performance: where it gets more nuanced than most articles admit The common comparison goes something like: PHP is faster for web requests, Python is faster for computation. That's... mostly true, but it flattens a more interesting reality. PHP was optimized
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