Re^2: CGI Replacement Recommendations?

.. you might also want to learn PHP. But that is not a very good language.

And yet compared to Perl, there are more PHP books being published, more jobs available, many in the Perl community prefer to use PHP based web publishing tools instead of Perl solutions, and the company where I work is moving away from Perl because they find it easier to hire PHP programmers.

I strongly dislike PHP because I feel it lacks so much of the elegance found in other dynamic languages, but I'm curious as to why you say it isn't a very good language? (it does seem to be quite a successful language)

Comment on Re^2: CGI Replacement Recommendations?

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Re^3: CGI Replacement Recommendations? by tilly (Archbishop) on Feb 09, 2011 at 06:45 UTC
Success and quality are only tangentially corrected. See Worse is Better for a classic essay on this theme. As I've commented many times, PHP is good for beginning programmers. It is easy to get simple things done. It is cheap to find hosting. It is easy to get started. So people do. They build useful stuff. People build on it. The language is successful. But the language itself is bad. It is very large, and disorganized. There are a ton of security holes in PHP. Even more in the popular applications. I've long commented that Larry Wall is better at hacking communities than languages. But for all the faults that Perl has - and it has quite a few in my opinion - PHP makes Perl look well designed. All of that notwithstanding, PHP is a very popular language. It is easy to find work in it. Much of said work is solving the same problems (albeit more efficiently) that were being solved by Perl CGI programs 15 years ago. So someone who is used to the Perl CGI space may well find PHP to be a good fit in terms of problems. I was giving it an honest recommend as a job option for the original questioner. I was just being clear that it isn't a language for language snobs.	[reply]
Re^3: CGI Replacement Recommendations? by Anonymous Monk on Feb 09, 2011 at 02:23 UTC
10+ years ago, merlyn said PHP - it's "training wheels without the bike". PHP still doesn't have a taint mode :) Re (tilly) 1: Why should I use PHP after this?	[reply]
Re^4: CGI Replacement Recommendations? by Anonymous Monk on Feb 09, 2011 at 02:48 UTC
Some old criticisms PHP in contrast to Perl PHP 5: not even close This says php finally added namespace support on 2009-06-30 in version 5.3.0	[reply]