usage

Does anyone even use python? What is it? Does it have advantages?
-andy

Read here for some of the benefits:
http://forums.devshed.com/t49286/s.html

Also, http://www.python.org is all you need as far as python info goes

Anyway, yeah, I use python all the time It's a wonderful language. You can build anything, from incredibly large apps in it (see: Zope) to teeny scripts. You should definitely give it a shot.

How would you compare it to PhP?

That's kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Python is much more diverse than PHP. It can be used to just about anything except write an OS and device drivers.

I've recently started learning Python after learning C and it's so easy to use and understand it's really not funny.

Yeah, PHP is easy for designing web stuff... for everything else, python is way out ahead - it's not even close. Python's even quite good at designing web stuff (especially if you use Zope). You should give it a look, I highly recommend it to anyone.

So what kind of software can one make with python, if not web sites? Are their job offers for python?

You can make anything from simple scripts to full-blown apps with Python. It's a great platform independent, OO, interpreted language with available bindings to many widget libraries such as GTK+, TK, and wxWindows just to name a few.

Not sure about job opportunities, you might want to search on some of the many job boards on the web.

You can, of course, learn both Python and PHP. Once you've learnt Python, learning PHP would be really, really easy, because they're pretty similar. Learning PHP and then Python would be a little more difficult, because you'd not only be learning the differences between the two languages, but all the extra stuff that Python can do as well.

It depends on your priorities. If you really want to jump into web development now, and then maybe branch out into making games, word processors, handy system scripts, and other programs, then you could learn PHP first (for web development), then once you're comfortable with PHP, start learning Python, and get into some "proper" programming

Or conversely, if you'd like to get into programming, and maybe look into web development at a later stage, start with Python.

You'll find more jobs knowing PHP, but better jobs knowing Python. Knowing both gives you the luxury of choosing either, and knowing Perl, C, C++ and Java on top just makes you mr/ms super employable!

if you want to use Python in the same way as PHP, then download Spyce. It let's you insert Python code into HTML pages just like PHP and it has all the modules you need.

Yeah I think python is much easier than php. I'd definitly recommend python over php since php changes and changes the entire structure without provication to those sites and scripts built on those specific addons. Its a real pain to have to upgrade your scripts and completely change them due to one function.

Python doesn't make changes like that on the otherhand so you dont need to worry about huge changes in the code that you will have to completely redesign your script. Python is also prettymuch straight foward.

But in the end result is popularity. Since python isn't very popular it isn't installed on some major hosting companys (they mainly install perl, php, etc) although some smaller and private companys may provide it. But it is hard to come by on the web exspecially amongst free hosts (disincluding sourceforge or any other osdn site.)

If you check out the python foundry on sourceforge you'll see that the foundry projects are very sparse.