Java vs PHP vs Python

Overview

PHP

Stacks147.4K

Followers82.9K

Votes4.6K

GitHub Stars39.6K

Forks8.0K

Python

Stacks262.8K

Followers205.4K

Votes6.9K

GitHub Stars69.7K

Forks33.3K

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Java vs PHP vs Python: What are the differences?

Java, PHP, and Python are three popular programming languages used for various purposes. They have some similarities but also several key differences that set them apart. In this markdown code, the key differences between Java, PHP, and Python are highlighted.

Syntax: One of the main differences between Java, PHP, and Python is their syntax. Java uses a statically-typed syntax where variable types must be declared explicitly, while PHP and Python use dynamically-typed syntax where variable types do not need to be specified. This difference can affect flexibility and ease of use in coding.
Performance: Another significant difference lies in the performance of these languages. Java is known for its high performance as it is compiled into bytecode and runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). PHP, on the other hand, is interpreted and runs directly without compilation, which can make it slower in certain cases. Python also uses interpretation but has various implementations and optimizations that make it competitive in terms of performance.
Web Development: PHP is widely used for web development due to its built-in support for web-related tasks. It has extensive libraries and frameworks tailored specifically for web development, making it a popular choice for creating dynamic websites. While Java can also be used for web development, it requires the use of external libraries and frameworks. Python, although not as commonly used for web development as PHP, has growing popularity in this area, thanks to frameworks like Django and Flask.
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): All three languages support object-oriented programming, but they have different approaches. Java enforces strict object-oriented principles, requiring objects to be encapsulated within classes. PHP initially had limited support for OOP but has since evolved and now fully supports OOP. Python, known for its simplicity, also supports OOP, but it allows for both procedural and object-oriented programming styles.
Community and Ecosystem: The size and diversity of the community and ecosystem around a programming language can significantly impact its popularity and support. Java has a large and well-established community with extensive documentation, libraries, and frameworks available. PHP also has a vibrant community, particularly with regards to web development, and multiple frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Python has a large and active community as well, with a broad range of libraries and frameworks for various purposes, including data science and machine learning.
Ease of Learning: The ease of learning a programming language can be subjective, but some factors can influence it. Java has a steeper learning curve due to its strict syntax and object-oriented principles. PHP, with its simple and forgiving syntax, can be relatively easier for beginners. Python, often praised for its readability and simplicity, is considered one of the easiest programming languages to learn.

In Summary, Java, PHP, and Python differ in terms of syntax, performance, web development capabilities, object-oriented programming approaches, community and ecosystem support, and ease of learning. These differences make each language suitable for specific use cases and can greatly influence the choice of developers.

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Advice on PHP, Python, Java

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

PHP	Python	Java
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.	Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.	Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
Statistics
GitHub Stars 39.6K	GitHub Stars 69.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 8.0K	GitHub Forks 33.3K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 147.4K	Stacks 262.8K	Stacks 148.0K
Followers 82.9K	Followers 205.4K	Followers 105.5K
Votes 4.6K	Votes 6.9K	Votes 3.7K
Pros & Cons
Pros 954 Large community 820 Open source 767 Easy deployment 488 Great frameworks 387 The best glue on the web Cons 21 So easy to learn, good practices are hard to find 16 Inconsistent API 8 Fragmented community 6 Not secure 3 Hard to debug	Pros 1186 Great libraries 966 Readable code 848 Beautiful code 789 Rapid development 692 Large community Cons 53 Still divided between python 2 and python 3 28 Performance impact 26 Poor syntax for anonymous functions 22 GIL 20 Package management is a mess	Pros 608 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code
Integrations
Laravel JavaScript	Django	Spring

What are some alternatives to PHP, Python, Java?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Clojure

Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

Related Comparisons

Java vs PHP vs Python: What are the differences?

Syntax: One of the main differences between Java, PHP, and Python is their syntax. Java uses a statically-typed syntax where variable types must be declared explicitly, while PHP and Python use dynamically-typed syntax where variable types do not need to be specified. This difference can affect flexibility and ease of use in coding.
Performance: Another significant difference lies in the performance of these languages. Java is known for its high performance as it is compiled into bytecode and runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). PHP, on the other hand, is interpreted and runs directly without compilation, which can make it slower in certain cases. Python also uses interpretation but has various implementations and optimizations that make it competitive in terms of performance.
Web Development: PHP is widely used for web development due to its built-in support for web-related tasks. It has extensive libraries and frameworks tailored specifically for web development, making it a popular choice for creating dynamic websites. While Java can also be used for web development, it requires the use of external libraries and frameworks. Python, although not as commonly used for web development as PHP, has growing popularity in this area, thanks to frameworks like Django and Flask.
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP): All three languages support object-oriented programming, but they have different approaches. Java enforces strict object-oriented principles, requiring objects to be encapsulated within classes. PHP initially had limited support for OOP but has since evolved and now fully supports OOP. Python, known for its simplicity, also supports OOP, but it allows for both procedural and object-oriented programming styles.
Community and Ecosystem: The size and diversity of the community and ecosystem around a programming language can significantly impact its popularity and support. Java has a large and well-established community with extensive documentation, libraries, and frameworks available. PHP also has a vibrant community, particularly with regards to web development, and multiple frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Python has a large and active community as well, with a broad range of libraries and frameworks for various purposes, including data science and machine learning.
Ease of Learning: The ease of learning a programming language can be subjective, but some factors can influence it. Java has a steeper learning curve due to its strict syntax and object-oriented principles. PHP, with its simple and forgiving syntax, can be relatively easier for beginners. Python, often praised for its readability and simplicity, is considered one of the easiest programming languages to learn.

Java vs PHP vs Python

Overview