It's a question I wrestled with recently.

I've used Perl for a longer time than PHP and I like it more. I don't enjoy coding in PHP and neither do I enjoy reading others' PHP code. It's easy to mix PHP code with html and as a resul a lot of PHP code out there is a pain to read (OsCommerce comes to mind).

With Perl, I'm more disciplined and use a templating system to separate Perl code from html. You can do that too with PHP with the aid of a module but because it's easy to include html in PHP code, people tend to fall into this habit (at least I do).

But (I hope I'm wrong here) most stuff I've come across on the Internet seems to suggest that PHP is faster as a web scripting language than Perl - for reasons cited in the comments above. So it's a hard decision to make. I would choose Perl because it's a much more powerful language yet PHP comes across as the natural choice for the web in terms of speed.

I'm curious to hear from anyone who's used Perl on a moderate to heavy traffic interactive site (with MySQL or similar) without using mod_perl - just Perl CGI (vanilla Perl, or whatever it's called). Is the site able to support say 100 users simultaneously?

In reply to Re: PHP over perl by Anonymous Monk
in thread PHP over perl by targetsmart

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