In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks takes a look at what he considers the real difference between PHP and Python.

Posting in the full realization of the futility of doing so, there's some PHP bashing (as usual) happening on reddit at the moment: PHP vs Python - the real difference, brought on by this mildly amusing image. While I can accept the points - technically it's actually much harder in handle errors uniformly in PHP and the community is less rich in computer scientists than Python - the corresponding flame war on reddit manages to miss a different point, which is easiest expressed in code.

He gives two sample scripts and asks what the real differences are. He answers his own question by way of saying that what matters between the two is how they're deployed (when it comes to error reporting):

Because PHP "resets" after each request ( see here or for much more detail here ) it's actually not always necessary to handle errors explicitly—assuming there’s not something fundamentally "broke" about your code and it's some kind of runtime error (e.g. db is down), it's often enough to just ignore the problem and wait for the system to "right itself" - nothing is going to leave PHP in a state it can't recover from.