I'm not bashing and didn't -- you, I just want to say that I had to plumb a couple of PEAR packages in the last year and the code was below the level of robustness and thoughtfulness that most of the mainstream/popular CPAN packages boast. The code was naïve: it was fine as long as everything worked exactly as expected and the environment had no surprises, otherwise it failed with a total lack of diagnostic information. If I weren't an experienced developer I would have spent a couple weeks trying to debug stupid problems with environment or databases with which the code, as published, was no help whatsoever in exploring.

Your comparison also isn't quite right. Perl ships with dozens of core modules, on the CPAN, which would be considered "official." These cover a huge range of purposes and at least a few date back to when PHP still stood for "personal home page."

I'm aware there are hundreds of shoddy modules on the CPAN. It's because it's not several, it's several hundred authors. Amidst the trash you can get a handful of first rate ORMs, XML parsers, HTML handlers, templating engines, servers, etc, etc, etc, etc… Solid, excellent, portable software. Not toys which rely on a set of expectations or a known installation environment. I'm not a PHP dev but from what little I've had to step into it, I'd say the CPAN is vastly superior, both in range -- which no one can argue -- and in quality of what's available if you know how to find it -- which can mean who to ask for help. PerlMonks has been here for 10 years, for example, and is quite international and friendly to ESLers. :)

In reply to Re^2: PHP over perl by Your Mother
in thread PHP over perl by targetsmart

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.