Other monks have already said everything I would say about why one should use Perl, but there's one thing I haven't seen much of a response to. You mention PHP "seem[ing]" like it is "now ... more popular than perl." My only response to that is, "Who cares?!?" I know I sure don't. Popularity only matters insomuch that there is a healthy community around a language. Perl still has a healthy community -- even in the "arena of CGI." (I put quotes around this because most PHP is probably not actually using CGI, and most sane Perl web apps shouldn't either.) This all leads me to my hyper-obvious conclusion: popularity sucks. Use what works.

--- Begin gratuitious .sig
$"=q//;$_=q/print"@{push@a,for(42+$_)gonqw;72 59 76 58 63 55 56 66 69
22 77 58 9 15 4 57 69 67 -32;;\@a}"/;s$(g)(?=on)$ f$;s;(?<=fo)(n);r ;
;s,  f (?!s#(44|60|47|59|62|51|49|58|54|58|47|64|44|62|45) #$x{$1}#ge
;map{$_+42}qw/t i n l w g c s k r i/)(?=or),c,x;s!(co)(?=r)!ch!x;eval

[download]

In reply to Re: perl's forte by revdiablo
in thread perl's forte by kiat

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.