Simon Willison’s Weblog

Which should I learn: Python or PHP?

16th April 2013

My answer to Which should I learn: Python or PHP? on Quora

Python will teach you more about programming than PHP—and you’ll be able to learn PHP easily if you learn Python first.

Posted 16th April 2013 at 4:01 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026
Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026

This is Which should I learn: Python or PHP? by Simon Willison, posted on 16th April 2013.

php 190 programming 158 programming-languages 42 python 1,277 quora 1,005

Next: What are some interesting and unusual tactics to draw people to your booth at a large conference or convention?

Previous: What could be the reason my login with Twitter stopped work in web site?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe