First, it is dangerous to ask something like that on the web. You're lucky this is PerlMonks, here people are rather diplomatic, fair and use Perl for good reasons.

My opinion about PHP: It is usefull, in certain situations: It must be a standard-task. The usual stuff, like "fetching something from a database and putting it into a website", maybe even "editing the database via the website". Nothing more. If you want to write a fast, easy and dirty solution to a rather popular problem, PHP is a good tool. You'll need to use it to set up a danymic webpage on a server without mod_perl, if you want a fast solution, for CGI might be not fast enough.

But that's all. If you want to write a "big software", PHP is ugly, especially if you know Perl. It is way too explicit and has no "syntactic shugar" and very seldom you have MTOWTDI. I usually start to see only chaos as soon as there are more then 100 lines of PHP. PHP is not as good as Perl in terms of "scalabilitiy": You don't have namespaces, the OOP forces you to keep a class in a file. PHP doesn't have real function-references, it is impossible to have something like Template::Toolkit in PHP, you must compute all stuff before. I've just written a Framework where most database queries happen only on demand from the template, nothing more is fetched than neccessary...

I don't like PHP, though i use it sometimes (I also don't like windows, but i use it sometimes). You can probably write good things in it, but there's no fun. Why should i use an interpreted language if it's as ugly to use it as C, especially when i have Perl available?

There's no need to "migrate from Perl to PHP", but it's not bad to know PHP. It is also not bad to know Ada,Delphi or other "bondage and discipline languages". It is good to know a lot.

--
http://fruiture.de

In reply to Re: php, eh? by fruiture
in thread php, eh? by dlink

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