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I just finished learning HTML5 and CSS3, and I intend to create a website that will have 1200-1500 registered users, an email generator for each user, meaning that each user must have a specific email with which he/she can be recognized in case of an issue or problem with other users (to monitor the activity, like the one used in universities like Harvard) , and maybe I will add a forum.

The problem is that I'm a bit confused about which server language to choose. I want one that is not that hard and that does not require too much time to learn, but one that can serve me in other projects since the one I just mentioned is personal, and most people advised me to learn PHP or Python. Which programming language do you recommend?

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  • For my money, Python is quicker and simpler to learn than PHP. It is also somewhat more flexible in non-web projects. That said, as already mentioned, while Python is a growing language for web apps, PHP is far and away more common.
    – Anaksunaman
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 17:25
  • Or… Java and Vaadin Framework to abstract away all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, WebSocket, Push, and templating work.
    – Basil Bourque
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 22:26

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I am happy coding both & don't find any major differences (although Python probably has more supporting libraries).

However, this page (also backed up by others, just Google), shows that 82.8% of websites are coded in PHP, as opposed to just 0.2% in Python.

Even if the tide is turning, those figures ought to tell you something. They seem to imply that you will find more support, FAQs, tutorials & examples for PHP.

For instance, Stack Overflow has 1,114,100 questions tagged PHP and 806,477 tagged Python. Not a major difference, but PHP was developed explicitly for web development and Python more as a general porpoise scripting language.

Two more points:

  1. Since you are planning to learn a new language, you might want to consider Node.Js for your server, since you will almost certainly want (eventually) to code JavaScript in your HTML pages, and you can cover both with one language.
  2. This question is very much off topic on this site (we recommend applications, not programming languages), so don't be surprised if it gets closed. Welcome aboard & hope this helped :-)
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    thank you so much , right now , i'm kind off limited in terms of time, and since you ( and most of those i asked this question to) mentioned that php is really popular, i will try to learn it , at least for my personal project, but once finished i will probably focus on NodeJs given that i will need to learn javascript like you said, thanks again
    – ProgFan2017
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 18:49
  • That's what I did. I do think that you will find PHP easier than JS. Good luck
    – Mawg
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 18:52
  • I think it's worth mentioning that "we don't recommend programming languages" is not really a rule or guideline in and of itself (that I'm aware of). The real issue is that all of Stack Exchange, even this site, strives to avoid questions that are too broad or that require too much subjectivity. I would argue that it is possible to have a concrete, mostly objective question about programming languages (e.g. if I want to build programs that run fast, should I use C or Python?), but in practice, most questions about choice of programming languages are too broad or too subjective.
    – John Y
    Commented Aug 28, 2017 at 14:08

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