> This is actually considered bad practice nowadays. I personally can't stand scripts that mix HTML output with code... they're an eyesore, and they cause you to have to read or write at least two files' worth of code at once (the script and its output). Even for small projects, I'll use templating of some sort.

And yet, this is the one thing I think PHP was ever good at. And thus it seems to me that PHP is busy abandoning the things it was designed for and was good at, in exchange for becoming a solidly mediocre scripting language. It is as if the language has this huge inferiority complex towards the other scripting languages, and wants to be just like them.

> I considered switching to Python a couple of weeks ago, but it's such a pain for web output, namely because there's so many ways that that can be done; as a slow CGI script, as a FastCGI script, using mod_python, using Python's built-in web server and/or a server built in Python itself... What a mess!

So flexibility is a drawback now? If Python is anything like Perl in this respect, you'll only need to follow some basic good programming practices to run properly on anything. Also, you can just design to be run as a normal CGI script, which is the overwhelmingly most common option.

> Is there any way to write a single script that will work the same on all possible setups? With PHP, it's not a concern.

...and I can't just let that one slip by: What about the myriad of different PHP installation options? Magic quotes? Safe mode? Differing PHP versions and installed modules? Don't go pretending PHP is some perfectly homogenous environment.