Re: Perl Popularity

My observation of PHP, is that the people who use it, don't know what they are doing and just want some canned scripts. And I'm already starting to notice the "homogenous appearance" of alot of PHP websites, and to me that makes me think the web programmer just slapped it together. Perl is good enough for me, FastCGI gives my plain old Perl CGI scripts a good boost, if I need it. I think the current situation with remote web servers is just a "temporary hassle", eventually there is going to be high speed access into every location...CHEAP. Then we will all be free to do what we want, instead of being forced to use the server setup of the Provider.

As far as PHP having all sorts of cool web gimmicks to display on your page, I don't care for it. I like simple interfaces, alot of those PHP sites give me the feeling of "glittering plastic". And if you ask most of those "PHP Wizards" to change something they don't know where to begin. Perl is far more valuable than PHP will ever be.

Comment on Re: Perl Popularity

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Re: Re: Perl Popularity by weierophinney (Pilgrim) on Dec 17, 2003 at 19:20 UTC
My observation of PHP, is that the people who use it, don't know what they are doing and just want some canned scripts. That's quite a generalization. I program in both Perl and PHP -- Perl at home, for freelancing, and at work for primarily systems scripts that require text processing; PHP at work for web applications. The decision to use PHP for web applications was made before I came, but I feel the reasons were sound: rapid prototyping; ability to create robust applications quickly and easily after prototyping; good and fast database abstraction layer (via PEAR); many programmers available should we need to outsource; and more. As for me, I like the fact that to add a session to a PHP script, I simply start it with 'session_start()'; accessing POST, GET, COOKIE, and SESSION variables is intuitive and fairly secure (if you program correctly); and sometimes it's just so much easier to embed the HTML into the script (though I try and avoid that -- I like to separate content from layout). I like perl for its robustness, and its extensibility -- I cannot do anonymous routines in PHP, for instance, which often bothers me, and I'll NEVER do any sort of systems or networking work with PHP -- and how easy it is to separate HTML from the scripted backend (HTML::Template and Template::Toolkit are excellent tools). But it's also easy for me to write code that others have trouble debugging; not so in PHP (whether or not that's a bonus is another question altogether). Perl and PHP are both excellent tools; use each where they make sense.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Perl Popularity
by weierophinney (Pilgrim) on Dec 17, 2003 at 19:20 UTC

My observation of PHP, is that the people who use it, don't know what they are doing and just want some canned scripts.

That's quite a generalization. I program in both Perl and PHP -- Perl at home, for freelancing, and at work for primarily systems scripts that require text processing; PHP at work for web applications.

The decision to use PHP for web applications was made before I came, but I feel the reasons were sound: rapid prototyping; ability to create robust applications quickly and easily after prototyping; good and fast database abstraction layer (via PEAR); many programmers available should we need to outsource; and more.

As for me, I like the fact that to add a session to a PHP script, I simply start it with 'session_start()'; accessing POST, GET, COOKIE, and SESSION variables is intuitive and fairly secure (if you program correctly); and sometimes it's just so much easier to embed the HTML into the script (though I try and avoid that -- I like to separate content from layout).

I like perl for its robustness, and its extensibility -- I cannot do anonymous routines in PHP, for instance, which often bothers me, and I'll NEVER do any sort of systems or networking work with PHP -- and how easy it is to separate HTML from the scripted backend (HTML::Template and Template::Toolkit are excellent tools). But it's also easy for me to write code that others have trouble debugging; not so in PHP (whether or not that's a bonus is another question altogether).

Perl and PHP are both excellent tools; use each where they make sense.

[reply]