As you might guess, Perl is far from dead.

The ranks of PHP programmers might be amazed to hear that. PHP is an easy languge to learn. It is far simpler than Perl, has far less flexibility and far less extensibility. PHP can do a good job of many CGI applications, at least as good as Perl!

It is true that in the eyes of many teachers of community college level 'web technology' or 'internet programming' course that Perl is dead. One teacher I know told me "I have a couple of hundred hours in which to teach these kids how to do some graphics editing, some animation using Flash, HTML design including CSS, and CGI programming." How do you teach the entire gamut of Perl in a couple of hundred hours? You don't, and where would you find the time to handle all the other niceties of Web work that these students need to know. This teacher works with PHP all day, but when he works for me out of hours it is all Perl, not a line of PHP to be found.

PHP has its place. It is a great environment which owes its very existence to Perl. It is quite capable of doing much of the day to day basic grunt work of the CGI programmer. PHP can do much but Perl can do so much more.

Perl 6 is far from stagnant. Totally new languages are not born in a few years. They take considerable amounts of time and effort on the part of many computer scientists. There are some great minds at work on Perl 6, just cruise over to perl.com and look for Perl 6 news. You will see that their is a great deal happening. Perl made its public debut on December 18th 1987, long before CGI was thought of! In the intervening 16 years some of the greatest minds of modern computer science have worked on Perl to make it what it is today. Some of those same minds and more besides are woking to make Perl 6 something truly unique and useful.

Perl is not dead, but Perl is not just CGI or Web Applications. Perl is also systems administration, network programming, Desktop applications, complex data processing (Perl Data Language), massive database administration and a host of other things.

PHP is many things too. But to nowhere the same extent. Can I wirte a GUI desktop application in PHP that is portable to most common platforms using PHP? Nope, but I just did it in Perl!

jdtoronto

In reply to Re: perl or php? by jdtoronto
in thread perl or php? by perlid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.