Hi, Tom,

Please excuse the guys who get sick of such questions. It does get old after a while. You've got to admit, asking a question like that on a Perl site is lighting a match in the powder room.

Dig deep into the references cited in Plat-forms Perl SNS platform comparison, posted just after yours. Very insightful, and should have been an app that PHP would have excelled at. Perhaps the PHP team members were less skilled, but that might also say something about PHP as well.

I, too, have had my flings with PHP and Ruby, and also a very bad experience with Java. My day job requires intense embedded C. For what it's good at, PHP is pretty good.

Still and again, though, I use Perl one way or another at least weekly. I haven't written any PHP in a year, and I only play with Rails when I get bored. Perl helps me manage my files ('perl -e' rocks!!!) and I use Perl a lot to do things like turning Microscat Excel files into C array declarations and ENUM lists, none of which you can easily do with PHP.

While we're playing with matches, what can you do with PHP _outside_ _of_ dynamic web pages?