Re^3: The REAL reason for why they choose PHP over Perl.

[phaylon]

Depends on the POV. If you're a programmer, sure Perl gives you better tools, if you're not biased. If you're just a wannawebpage newbie, things like lexical scoping with my, closures, map, grep, contexts and alike are things you can't imagine to be useful. You just want HTML escaping, mysql (and all other supported database drivers) all other tools you use stuffed right into the namespace of your mywebpage.php4.

Sure PHP has bigger usages and *is* and *can* be professionally used. But in my view that's neither the majority nor the part that started this hype.

[adrianh]

But in my view that's neither the majority nor the part that started this hype.

The vast majority of Perl, on the other hand, is produced by programming gods, and is always a thing of beauty :-)

Seriously though - I agree completely. It's just that PHP is neither:

• Half as bad as many people say it is - especially since PHP 5
• Only used by incompetents.

[phaylon]

It's just that PHP is neither: Half as bad as many people say it is - especially since PHP 5

Well, IIRC there are still no namespaces, it's still thousands of functions from hundreds of libraries I did not invite partying in my basement. The calling conventions are still organized like Alice's wonderland and there are no closure-like things. Calling "call_user_func" with an array just doesn't count :)

Of course, it's still a question on how to define "bad." It's surely not bad per se, as nothing is, but it is for me personally for a number of reasons (some stated above).

[adrianh]

Well, IIRC there are still no namespaces, it's still thousands of functions from hundreds of libraries I did not invite partying in my basement. The calling conventions are still organized like Alice's wonderland and there are no closure-like things. Calling "call_user_func" with an array just doesn't count :)

But with fairly decent OO support we can stick things in classes, which gets around the lack of name spaces most of the time. Lack of anonymous functions and closures is a pain - as is the huge mess of inconsistently named subroutines.

No it's not the best language in the world. It's definitely not my favourite language by quite some way. Neither is it a completely inappropriate choice for professional work.