Re: PHP over perl

I'll give you two points of view that you can include it, I started with Perl for more than 10 years since the beginning the problem was the documentation, my native language is not English and understand things in complicated technical English is by far a terrible headache, the documentation is only in technical English as well as books :-(, there are concepts that after several years I realized what it meant.

On the other hand PHP is a language designed for web, where every day they incorporate more and more modules in their official API?, Instead this Perl replace, or we replace, it with CPAN and CPAN is the union of several single individual developers and this is prone to have errors, how many times you wanted to do something fast and you lose 10 hours by a bug in some package that wasn't documented or poorly documented.

Please don't confuse, i don't said that CPAN is bad, not please, i said that PHP has oficial "modules" with more control becouse in general they use an inplementation of popular software with several years in the market

Exists to much to discuss, but I consider important it, because Perl6 follows the same line :-(.

Cheers!.

Comment on Re: PHP over perl

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Re^2: PHP over perl by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 21, 2009 at 08:06 UTC
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. :)	[reply]
Re^3: PHP over perl by way (Sexton) on Feb 27, 2009 at 18:18 UTC
Just an small comment to don't misunderstand my opinion, i'm not talking about difference between PEAR and CPAN, is really imposible compare one to another, becouse CPAN have a lot years of great contributions and 15228 modules today!! against 528!! of PEAR... I'm talking about the built-in function/modules that make PHP more easy and functional to use without error, it self, or at least with less error, in fact this made the difference between a web lenguage, worst or better i don't know, and a multi purpouse language like Perl. But by far the documentation is the great difference just put www.php.net/thecommandtoseethedocumentation and you can see a brief and useful description in your language with several, no good but useful too, comment below, i don't know for me is an advantage And yes like Your Mother said, Perl is better has many resource of search information, modules and you can find help like Perlmonks, but instead it, PHP grow up much faster, why? becouse is more easy and is focus in certain point, web developement, i guess.	[reply]