I hate to be the one to return to this subject which has caused so much ... well, I don't know if fighting is the correct word, maybe arguing, but anyway, you get the point. Recently, I have been looking into the world of PHP. I haven't read much on it but I did read the section on it in O'Reilly's Webmaster in a Nutshell. It went over the basics of it and how it can be embeded and it gave short descriptions of many of its functions. I tried to install php on my Linux box, but I ran into some trouble with Apache, so I haven't been able to experiment with it much.

However, I did go through the Monastery and read some threads comparing Perl with PHP. Among them were php? and Compare Perl vs PHP. I read through them and found that they had many of the same opinions which I had formed before coming to them. So I want to in a post give my own opinions on the subject and I'm sorry if I end up repeating other posts, but hopefully I will be able to express a new perspective on the situation.

In addition to looking at these two languages as programming languages, I want to also look at them as programs in themselves.

Okay. So, you have a program. It works and can do the things you need it to do. However, you want to make it more pleasant to use, so you add some help features and maybe some nice graphics, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as you add to your program, the program becomes less effecient. It still does what you need it to do and more, but the things you wanted to use it for in the first place, slow down with the additions of other features.

For me, the same situation is apparent between Perl and PHP. PHP is basically a good web tool with pretty good form handling capabilties as well as great database tools. Perl can be used for that and much, much more. That is why we refer to Perl as "full featured", or something like that. But, as Perl has more features than PHP, the aspects of Perl that PHP is commonly used for, slow down in Perl. So, even though PHP is much more limited in its usage than Perl, what it can be used for, is more effiecient than the same usages in Perl.

In conclusion, from my evaluation of the situation, I find that it is impossible for one programming language to be the best in everything, because more specialized languages will excel better in there specialty than a "full featured" language does in the same field.

Being the inexperienced programmer that I am, I may be very wrong. If so, can you please tell me that and try to explain to me how I am wrong. Thank you.

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog7@hotmail.com

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