How I came to love developing in Python

As I've implied previously, I find PHP a desperately bad language for developing web applications. Python is my current favourite; it is a joy to work with both in writing code and maintaining code. Using Python, I can develop web applications faster and with more complexity, than I ever could with PHP.

There was a disaster a couple of years ago with PHP which was the reason my preference changed. PHP fell apart when it came to the crunch, but using Python I was able to rapidly pick up the pieces. I was developing an application which would display quite an extensive mortgage application form, collect the answers and print them back to the PDF, because the mortgage lender was still using a paper-based system.

I developed a system which read questions in XML. The asking of some questions could be predicated on the answers given to previous questions. This allowed me to omit questions which the original paper form didn't require, and this would mean that I could require valid values to all of the questions I asked.

I had written the system in PHP, as was our standard practice at the time. Obviously this required quite complex data structures; each question was an object, but the predication was effectively a parse tree which could be be evaluated - collapsed to a single value: true, false or unknown. PHP makes this kind of work a huge nuisance. It's only got a SAX parser, which means you need your own stack to parse it, and when you're doing any data structure work in PHP you have to be very careful to keep references rather than copies, which means you have to insert & in every assignment and function spec, and you can't update the $v in foreach ($x as $k=>$v) - that's also a copy.

The system worked on my simple hand-drafted test data, which was much of the first page of the form, but it was extremely laborious to set up the XML source, because the questions needed coordinates from the PDF.

I stopped work on the web application and swapped over to writing a tool to generate the XML input from the original paper form, which we had in the form of a PDF. I wrote a Java tool which called on Ghostscript to render the PDF, and displayed a Swing and Java2D UI to draw the fields onto the page.

A week of programming and 3 days and 12 pages of questions later, I plugged a completed XML file into the PHP application, and... nothing. Blank page. Couldn't get any output from PHP at all. It turned out PHP was segfaulting serialising the data structure. This was an almost impossible situation to resolve; the gdb trace was useless, the project was running late, and PHP wasn't behaving in a deterministic way, making it impossible to debug.

The best solution I could think of was to rewrite the entire application in a language I trusted more than PHP, and Python, which I had been experimenting with, seemed appropriate. I already had a very basic framework for writing CGI applications in Python, and even though I didn't start with a session system, I was able to write one, transcribe the PHP into Python, and get it all up and running within about 2 hours, which I remain impressed with to this day.

As I worked, I found I could transcribe every PHP construct into Python quickly and more succinctly. I could simply omit the & nonsense as objects are always passed by reference. It's amazing to be able to look at a block of PHP code, recall what it does, and write one line of Python which can do the same thing, omitting all the hoops that PHP requires you to jump through to construct data structures.