The most important characteristic of a programming language designer (apart from the normal nerdy technical brilliance) is to have to taste. Any popular language will have a thousand feature requests at any given time, and the designer has to pick and choose the ones that fit into the overall scheme of things.

Python has achieved a fine balance between the needs of different communities. [...] IMHO, PHP is also maturing rapidly, though the PHP community is probably 4 years younger than Python in terms of level of sophistication.

John compares these two languages in terms of community, functionality, and, of course, popularity. He notes the good balance that Python has developed in it's own niche, and also talks about a few of his gripes about PHP 5 (including: inadequate date and timestamp type support, lack of good threading support, and extensions are still too hard to write).

Here's hoping that PHP does continue on the way that he states - I also hope that PHP6, 7, 8, 9 and so forth continue to develop, but in the direction of being ported to run on advanced virtual machines such as Parrot, JVM and CLR, supported by more powerful frameworks, and not language featuritis.