Heh, some of you may have seen me mucking around the chatterbox asking these questions, but I figured I'd give them a centralized home.

To start off, I've been working with PHP for awhile and have gotten pretty good at it. Which is nice, since all of what I do up to this point is web programming. However, I would like to do some GUI and command line programming at some point in time, which is what brought me to Perl (Perl can do GUI, right?).

My question is that I have some applications and classes, with maybe 1,600 lines of PHP code written. Is it worth it to drop everything, take time to learn Perl (I'm only at the baby steps right now), port that code over, and continue writing in Perl?

So I'm wondering about a couple of things specifically related to web development. Obviously it is possible (See: PerlMonks), but is it as easy and powerful as PHP? I ask this only because PHP was targeted specifically at the Web. Is there anything that you lose by using Perl instead of PHP?

I also have three general Perl questions:
1) Does it get complicated using lots of different modules? Is it hard to keep them updated?
2) Can somebody point me to a thread detailing how to import subs, like a library?
3) Have there been any problems or gotchas you have experienced or noticed which consistently occur amongst converts?

I really, really appreciate this. I look forward to learning Perl, PerlMonks has been great so far :-).

Update, 3/9, 7:00 PM EST:
New question. Can Perl handle AJAX? It would make sense for AJAX to work the same as it would with PHP (JavaScript sends a request for a URI, and then utilizes any output from that page), but I wanted to make sure.

Update, 3/9, 10:00 PM EST:
Another new question. Inspired by responses I've received, I decided to give Catalyst a try. It looks cool, though I'm having trouble getting started with it. First, the search for "Catalyst" returns 900+ results on CPAN. Do I need to install each one of these? Is there a way to install modules other than downloading the tarballs and compiling them? Second - the documentation references a file named "catalyst.pl", but I'm not sure where that comes from. Any beginners guides out there for starting with Catalyst? Help appreciated!

Update, 3/0, 4:30 PM EST:
WOW. I've really just started to look around CPAN's module collection. Very nice, I can see I'll be doing a lot less coding than I originally thought, provided I can put down my dislike of using other people's code, of course ;-) . Any tips on finding modules you need?

In reply to From PHP to Perl - Should I, and how? by salazar

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