Fellow monks, I think I've finally answered the question as to why PHP is, generally speaking, more successful. I have to point to their corporate backing which largely comes from Zend. Zend offers above and beyond the free PHP stuff other commercial products too, and they take the proceeds from these product, and dump them back into the language. Zend actually produces seven products all of which can be found on their PHP powered website at zend products. Zend even produces an Optimizer which makes all of your php code run up to "25times faster." That's really good news for php, especially considering php is pretty fast anyway.

I mean look at this, the Zend core actually runs Oracle and has been ported to IBM. Which makes me think maybe the core being more full featured than PERL's is the reason for PHP's success. Obviously, it has some advantages; or why would big blue, and Oracle have adopted it? Maybe its the additional free support Zend provides that the Perl foundation doesn't, IBM support and Oracle support.

Zend even offers certificates, and they are "confidant you will pass the first time." That's probably because the language has no learning curve whatsoever. You are almost born knowing it! And, if you get both certificates you get a $25 discount. Lets say though you find php cryptic, for 769.00 you can get Zend professional training. Another important thing Zend offers is consultation, which isn't readily available in the Perl community.

The solution to this problem is simple, Perl needs some really big corporate backing too, like either Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Apple. Maybe there is some way we can get Larry to hand over the project to Zend. Or maybe some day Zend will build a Perl optimizer for us that will run our applications 25 times faster. We probably also need these big corporate guys to run on our core as well, at least Apple; surely the PERL core can handle them.