It was definitely a comparison thing. Originally I went for C, but as time went by I wanted a web technology. Though I knew PHP was gaining fame, it seemed to me that PHP was too narrow and specialized, and inherently weaker than Perl with a good templating system.

Picking up Programming Perl was the smartest thing I did at that point, because Larry Wall's way of presenting Perl impressed me strongly and convinced me to plunge into it.

Besides, to me it seemed more advantageous to use a "big" language like Perl which I could use on many other applications than a little, apparently derivative language like PHP. And obviously ASP, ColdFusion and Java were too proprietary for me to be interested. Finally the deciding factor was CPAN; and I was right.


In reply to Re: I first became interested in Perl because... by DarkClaw
in thread I first became interested in Perl because... by jimt

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.