in reply to Another prediction of Perl's demise

Hi bradcathey,

Haven't seen you around for a while :)

I toyed with PHP a couple of days ago. Didn't go too much into it but it did give me an idea of why it's increasingly becoming popular for building dynamic sites: ease of use simple to use.

With perl, there's a little bit more work involved e.g. using "use CGI;" whereas with PHP, things like retrieving cookies can be done with a global variable without having to import any modules.

PHP seems to me to be a (blessed) marriage between Javascript and Perl: Javascript because of the ease with which php code can be called from within an html page; Perl because it has syntax quite similar to perl.

For simple dynamic sites, it's tempting to use PHP. But once the site gets larger, maintenance might become problematic because of global variables.

Perl's survival doesn't depend on its popularity with CGI stuff. If it did, then the work on Perl 6 would have been a waste, imho.

  • Comment on Re: Another prediction of Perl's demise

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Another prediction of Perl's demise
by bradcathey (Prior) on Nov 25, 2004 at 04:11 UTC

    Thanks, kiat. Yeah, I've been out of development for a while--doing boring old print work.

    After being chided here at the Monastery for not using -T or -w or strict or some other convention, when I first started working with PHP I was taken aback by it's casual approach to such issues. I felt like I was cheating. And oh, those 'for' loops--goofy.

    But I think tachyon is right, I need to have a working understanding of PHP. I just hope I don't have to bow to the gods in Redmond and start learning ASP. I might just open up that bait shop I've always wanted.


    —Brad
    "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." G. K. Chesterton
[reply]
      I have never used ASP, and for some reasons, I just don't like it.

      Between ASP and PHP, it's definitely PHP for me (I think friendster is coded in PHP).

      Yah, it's definitely good to know PHP.

[reply]

        And is it ASP or VBScript you dislike ;-} Don't confuse the two, that'd be just like thinking CGI=Perl=CGI.

        BTW, we do use ASP, we even use VBScript, mostly for historical reasons. But recently we went crazy and since the ASPs go through a "translator" program anyway we started mangling the language. So we can now use heredocs and q{} and qq{} quoted strings in both VBScript and JavaScript, we can interpolate variables and even expressions in the heredocs, qq{}s and outside scripts with $[ expression ], we can write >>> instead of Response.Write, db->StoredProcedure(... instead of OnErrorRedirect db.StoredProcedure(..., etc. etc. etc. The next candidates for "extensions" are +=, &=, -=, *=, /=, ++ and --. I said, we went crazy ;-)

        Jenda
        We'd like to help you learn to help yourself
        Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes
        Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home
           -- P. Simon in Mrs. Robinson

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re^2: Another prediction of Perl's demise
by Juerd (Abbot) on Nov 25, 2004 at 16:58 UTC

    Didn't go too much into it but it did give me an idea of why it's increasingly becoming popular for building dynamic sites: ease of use.

    Ease of learning just enough to get a bare minimum working. Not ease of use. Real day-to-day use or a careful study reveals the many flaws.

    Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

[reply]

In Section Meditations