>>  For instance,
>> my first project in python involved capturing keyboard input before
>> windows heard about it.  Then I kept discovering amazing things python
>> can do that php cant.
>
> For instance, PHP can do this fine. Was there something in particular
> you're thinking of that PHP can't do?

Yes, It was irresponsible for me to make a blanket statement like that
without having very much experience with php.  I used php to make a
website from data in a database. Other things beyond that seemed
awkward, difficult, or impossible from what I knew. python immediately
jumped out to me as a tool more suited to these tasks.

I guess it was just the way I came across things, my own personal
history.  From my experience, it seemed php was a server side
scripting language.  Can you write a php script that gets key presses
and doesn't pass them along to windows to process?  I thought the OS
would have to process the key press, pass it along to the php server
and then php could process it. (pyhook)

Also, how would you go about using a GPU from a graphics card in php?
(python cuda in google gives many results)

Has anyone written a scientific computing package along the lines of
matlab in php (scipy, numpy, matplotlib)?  Or a non-sequential optical
raytracer?

if you wanted to write a web interface for GNU cash or another well
established accounting program, could you do it? (GNU cash has python
bindings to its internal functions,  I believe no other scripting
language can access the things python can.  This is the case with many
programs, python bindings but nada for php).

please feel free to point me to the php equivilants of pyhook, pycuda,
scipy, numpy and some examples of widely used programs with php
bindings.

>  For the sophisticated hacker, most languages can
> be tweaked to solve almost any problem.

I am sure that is true. Though, I feel many for many tasks php would
require quite a bit more tweaking than python, with much less
community support behind it (I mean, google comes up with fewer
helpful links to the problems I sited above).

Maybe Php can accomplish many things by calling external programs.  Is
that the case?  and then are you limited to whatever commandline
options the external program has?

My impression, based on very little experience with php, is that if
you asked in a forum about using php for advanced scientific
computing, or writing music generation/sequencing software,
knowledgeable folks would first ask: "are you sure you want to do this
in php?  how about java or python?"

That said, php may be superior for generating websites from databases.
 That is why it is difficult to find help through google about php,
because all the searches turn up websites generated by php, not
written about it.

I'll be more careful about my praising of python over other scripting
languages in the future.

Thanks,
Elliot