I've been a web developer for a long time but I'm still stuck with this one big question. I really love PHP, esp. its fast overall development and deployment cycle. But people I meet have been arguing with me to switch to Python, which I'm yet unsure of. I remember having seen somewhere that Python is even less efficient performance wise. So why should I (if at all) move to Python?
You'll learn something, additional career opportunities (maybe) and improved prestige among the developer community (guaranteed) come to mind.<p>It never hurts to have more than one language in your quiver. If you're looking for work and are having a hard time finding a PHP gig that suits your fancy, having some other language dialed to the point you can code in it professionally increases your odds of finding (and keeping) a job.<p>Of course, I make a good living coding PHP for high end websites, and have been for years now. I just don't talk a whole lot about the language that pays the bills since invariably mentioning PHP is your primary language leads to a torrent of hot air from other developers who use "cooler" languages. Personally, I think it's all bullshit and if folks want to play "cool kid" with their language of choice, that's fine, but don't expect me to play along.<p>Fun fact: the highest paid programmer I've met to date coded exclusively in COBOL. Think monster 1099 rates consulting on legacy mainframe code overhauls.
Stick with PHP. You already know it. With PHP-FPM you can easily scale PHP to multiple cores and have a stable FCGI interface. There is nothing Python can offer you that PHP can't.