[mod_python] supporting modular mod_python extensions vs. "folding" mod_psp

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 01:56:09PM -0400, Todd Grimason wrote:
> This I'm too new and inexperienced to comment on. I can say it
> eternally frustrates me that almost every ISP in the world supports
> mod_php but near-zero mod_python. Hopefully this will improve

I'm not tremendously surprised by this, actually.

By way of background, I should note that I've been programming Perl for
about 11 years now, PHP for about two years, and Python for about two
months.  You can guess which one's my favourite (though they're not
exactly interchangeable).

In my experience, it's easier to integrate PHP into a light-weight web
system than, say, Python.  This is both from the installation
perspective (I had to battle mod_python a little to get it to work on my
system) and from the authoring perspective, where PHP is the VisualBasic
of the programming world; it's closer to ASP in its simplicity than
Python is.  I was authoring PHP code within about a day of getting it
installed; I still haven't done anything useful with mod_python, though
I'm working on it. 

Now, mind you, that comes at a cost -- in my experience, it's much more
likely to see brute-force PHP projects that have just amazingly nasty
code (I recently had to put some bugfixes into a 12,000 PHP project and
was ... horrified at some of the practices), and Python almost forces
you to write nice code.  Partially, it's that old OOP concept -- even
after using PHP for about two years, I only realized a few months ago it
had classes -- nobody I talked to ever used them, mentioned them, or
referred to them in any documentation.  

-roy