in reply to Perceptions of Perl - views from the edge

That was really great, thanks for sharing it. I loved the bit about which language was which metaphorical spanner.

One of the points, though, was "Many cheap hosting packages don’t work well out of the box with perl." I'd noticed this in the past, and never really thought about it. Why is this true? Is it worries that Perl, if misused by a novice, will do more damage than PHP misused by a novice? Perceived slowness of Perl? Maybe the Perl name doesn't sell hosting space, your survey seemed to indicate that web dev people aren't thinking of Perl as an option. The only other thing I can think of is that Perl is like the book If you Give a Mouse a Cookie, only really more like "If you give a Perl person module X, they'll want module Y to go with it."

Pair.com, who I discovered via PerlMonks, seems to be both operating well and offering a crapload of Perl. Maybe it is because they cater to the audience here, which tend not to be novices?

Sorry to ramble a bit there, it just sparked my curiosity. Again, that was a neat survey, and thanks for sharing the results.

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Re^2: Perceptions of Perl - views from the edge
by tilly (Archbishop) on Feb 15, 2008 at 06:46 UTC
    A very big reason is that you can easily have one server serve many different websites with PHP because PHP does not give you deep hooks into Apache.

    CGI is a lot slower, and you don't want everyone to use that because it takes more resources. If you try to speed things up with mod_perl you run into trouble because you've given too much access away and now one customer can accidentally stomp all over another customer's website.

Re^2: Perceptions of Perl - views from the edge
by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Feb 15, 2008 at 17:00 UTC
    Aside from tilly's points, I've also found that some of my clients with the cheaper/more-restrictive web hosting plans are only allowed ftp access to the server, not ssh (or other shell) access. If your Perl uses any modules that aren't already provided by the hosting service, they're a little trickier to install with only ftp and can be impossible to install in some cases (e.g., xs-based modules when you don't have access to a build environment compatible with the target web host).