to all the haters: I know it can do things outside of webpages, but it is very specifically tailored for webpages. anyway that's just my impression. I did write some PHP in the past in the context of webpages. then I wanted to do things that were not webpages and PHP was not helping me on that, so I stumbled into Python and that was easier to use for non-webpages (in fact it was much harder to use for webpages).