I am having difficulty figuring out your point. Is it that, when you Google for examples for how to do something in Python, you usually don't find satisfactory results? But that other languages (Perl, PHP) do provide such results?
If that's the case, then what particular task you're asking about is going to impact how successful you are. People write much more than just "web-related" things in Python. And, personally, I don't consider that to be important for what I consider a critical mass of users. Rather, what I think is important is that there is enough of a community to provide good online documentation, plenty of technical books, maturity of the toolchain, and integration in most systems.
I'm sorry my point was unclear. Often I place speed (i.e. time-until-I'm-not-doing-this-anymore) at an incredible premium to the point where I don't care what the language is! For example, say that you want to attach a process to monitor a logfile of your web-server(apache, say) and SEND YOU AN EMAIL when a string enters that logfile.
Hopefully, you should be able to complete this task in every single programming language that appears on your resum, including javascript if you have put it there.
In practice, if you are a one-man show trying to get a whole startup off the ground (including all of the biz dev, all of the back-end, all of the front-end, all of the customer e-mails, EVERY SINGLE THING YOUR COMPANY IS DOING) then you don't have the luxury to scratch every itch. There are itches that you can scratch if someone has done it and you can find this out in 15-20 seconds, otherwise, you just don't have the time.
In this sense PHP wins where Python has not yet won.
I understand what you're saying, but I still don't feel that its relevant. Your example is the sort of thing that I would expect myself and other developers to be able to produce a more reliable solution on their own than what they could copy-and-paste from the web. In other words, I wouldn't do it myself because I felt like I "had to scratch that itch." I would do it myself because otherwise I would have no trust that it would work.
Right, I think your final sentence gets at the crux of what I'm talking about. I have 0 trust in PHP that my script really 'works' -- however, very often I have a lot more confidence in being able to get to something that 'seems to work' within 30 seconds. Whereas, in Python I am pretty much guaranteed to spend 5-15 minutes on it.
Ability to tail small and big files for updates using PHP and AJAX. Includes the ability to grep results for a specific keyword.
- Fully documented
- Fully customizable
- Updates the page with new information without a page refresh
- Change GREP keyword / invert on the fly without a page refresh
- Uses JQuery / JQueryUI libraries
- Simple to use UI
- Automatic scrolling when required (if a user scrolls up, the automatic scroll is disabled until the user scrolls to the bottom again)
Wow, that is pretty amazing. If someone just HAPPENS to be looking for a quick tail through a web-browser, with grep functionality, this is a drop-in solution. It's not what I needed, but this is my whole point about community-size. As it gets larger and larger, there is a greater and greater possibility that just what you need is 30 seconds away. It would literally take you hours to do all of the above in Python.
If that's the case, then what particular task you're asking about is going to impact how successful you are. People write much more than just "web-related" things in Python. And, personally, I don't consider that to be important for what I consider a critical mass of users. Rather, what I think is important is that there is enough of a community to provide good online documentation, plenty of technical books, maturity of the toolchain, and integration in most systems.