Why PHP?

Ok so you want to create a dynamic website and you don't know how to start. Now here, you should first select what language to use and I suggest you go PHP.

So why PHP? Why not go with ASP?
Well, this may be debated a lot and many favors PHP over ASP.

And what is PHP anyway?
PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Back again to the question why choose PHP over ASP?

I will answer that in my own opinion base on my experiences and knowledge of the language.

First, PHP is an open source, having a very huge support community, you can always ask solution to problems in your codes whenever you ran into one.

Also, in my opinion (which is actually proven), PHP codes runs much faster than ASP because it runs in its own memory space while ASP uses an overhead server and a COM based architecture.

Less Expensive Software – In working with PHP, most tools associated with the program are open source software, such as WordPress, Joomla, Dolphin, etc. so you need not pay for them.

PHP vs. Python

Python has emerged as a robust scripting language for web development and also for general programming. PHP however has a short learning curve but if we talk about the long-term, python is more productive than PHP. The most suitable framework for Python is Django framework, whereas PHP works on Kohana, Symfony, CodeIgnitor, and Zend. Python is more readable than PHP and other programming languages.

Python and PHP bot have great product documentation, both have great community support, however, one of the most important factor to consider is developing a website or any application is the speed of execution especially those website with millions of visits on a daily basis. A delay of 3 times slower significantly impact performance. Version 5 release of PHP is slow but the version 7 release, the execution speed is extremely fast which really beats python.

Well, there are tons of blogs that favors python over PHP, but think about it. In web development, Speed and Performance comes first. There's no point of developing a web application using tons of libraries with a very easy coding that idiots can easily comprehend, but lacks of execution speed and performance.

For reasons, PHP stays to be one of the best in the market is because of its speed and performance, community, low resource usage, hosting platform is in abundance. One very bad point against Python is called Fragmentation. There are two versions of Python, the version 2.x and the version 3.x and both has major incompatibilities. You have to choose what to learn between the two.