Why do people keep looking at it as an "Either/or" proposition?

I've had jobs where I used Perl, PHP, and ASP as the primary web language. However I've always found that knowing Perl and PHP complimented each other very well. Yes if you're going to write a web application that uses a database then PHP will the the primary if not the only language you need. However for most other scripting tasks and many other things that require programming, there is already a Perl module out there that does just what you need.

My current job about 80% of it is PHP and 15% is Perl (the other 5% is some combination of ASP, Java, and a few other languages). I wouldn't dare think to write that 15% of Perl stuff in PHP. It's either not a web application or I'd end up with 100's of extra lines of code and something that probably didn't work right. And just as I wouldn't think of doing the Perl stuff in PHP, I generally wouldn't do the PHP stuff in Perl (admittedly PHP is my default language and there are a number of things I could probably do just as well in Perl as PHP).

Bottom line is that no language will be the perfect tool for every situation (although Perl probably comes the closest). Therefore you're asking the wrong question when you ask things like "has the battle been lost?" The better question is "What tool do I need to do this task in a quick and efficient way?"

In reply to Re: Perl vs PHP and the Future by xorl
in thread Perl vs PHP and the Future by webchalkboard

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.