in reply to Re^2: perl as a php alternative
in thread perl as a php alternative

thanks, everyone. wikipedia is indeed a first goto source for me before I investigate anything further.

I played with mojo 3 years ago and thought it was very clever. too clever for my needs. sometimes simple is good.

the "many choices" is not always the best. I think this is why php survived. there was no one single perly choice with good prospects. (there are many abandoned projects; building a website requires betting on the underlying framework.) of course, at some point below, variety must stop. perl would not have succeeded with 20 projects. there is one perl5 project and one perl6 project.

so, if I start now, let's say I want a php-like embeddable scripting language that has:

  1. a project with more than 5 core developers and likely survival for a decade.
  2. perl6 syntax and perl6 cpan
  3. $_SESSIONS[]
  4. easy ubuntu install
is there a project that checks these four boxes? mojo? /iaw

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Re^4: perl as a php alternative
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Dec 05, 2015 at 18:29 UTC

    PHP survived because it takes nearly no programming skills at all and appeared at the jump when the best Perl options (modperl, fastcgi) were hard to install and the other good high level languages had no real web presence; 15 years ago. This is also why nearly everything done with PHP has been plagued by security problems. If you like the style, stick with it. You can absolutely do the same thing in Perl but it would be silly.

    • Catalyst is a decade old already. Mojo isn’t going anywhere. Dancer has a big community. Packages like Template::Toolkit and DBIx::Class have dozens and dozens of contributors, like me and a few other monks.
    • No. Perl6 is not ready and it is a much more sophisticated language than Perl5 and PHP. It will not reward junior devs but punish them. It will be one–two years after its first real release when solid frameworks will appear. Till then, here be little but dragons.
    • Every web framework has sessions out of the box and Mojo in particular is more secure out of the box. PHP on the other hand is trivial to screw up and write insecure code and there are ooooooodles of terrible examples and advice for it out there. It’s basically guaranteed to mess up if you don’t know good practices. Perl is also… but not as badly or automatically. The community has a strong sense of best practices v dangerous practices.
    • Everything in Perl is easy to install excepting some XS/Image packages. perlbrew (update, fixed link), App::cpanm, etc.
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Re^4: perl as a php alternative
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Dec 05, 2015 at 19:18 UTC

    Also, wikipedia should never be your source for this kind of information and should be treated with some skepticism for all other information. Mason’s last update was 6 months ago.

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      Yeah, as Ben Franklin wisely wrote, "Don't trust everything you can read on the Internet" (Poor Richard, An Almanack for the Year of Christ 1739, Philadelphia, 1738).

      This being said, yes, indeed, Wikipedia should be treated with some skepticism, especially for some "hot" subjects, but it is often a better source of information than many other sources. Please, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[reply]
        wikipedia is not a source of information -- always check the references
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