Re: Perl myths ?

[exussum0]

Let's disect...

Another downside to Perl is it's *apparent* lack of market share when compared to PHP. When looking at resources sites two years ago, Perl scripts numbered around 3,000 and PHP scripts numbered around 400. Now most resources sites show around 3,500 Perl scripts and 5,000 PHP scripts. There are two factors at work here:

Well, perl has one gigantic advantage over php. Install solaris, redhat linux, freebsd, mac os x... they all come preinstalled with perl. redhat also includes python, os x includes python, php and ruby. but they all come with perl. You see.. perl was developed as a language for dealing with complex situations... php was developed to mimic perl and other languages to solve the "programming on the web with 0 administration issues". With perl, all stderr stuff gets issued to the error log. If it's not chmod +x, to the error log and a strange error. There are a few other gotchas as well with perl, but they are small.

PHP was geared for the person who didn't have this type of access, or want to deal with it. The creator of php ran it on his own box for the purpose of web forms, which doesn't really help in design of the language. With perl, ther is consistancy all over the place, plus a sense of expression. With php, you get convenience and that's about it.

For example, creating a tool to render a page will always be an "easy task" that should be relatively short. One of the biggest problems with php is that the designer never thought out everything. Quite frankly, it's a mess with 3000 core functions, many of which duplicate functionaliy, and things arne't abstracted out nicely, like DBI. mysql_pconnect vs pgsql_connect anyone?

the Perl scripts available are robust programs. Perl is still the de-facto language for e-commerce on the Net.

No, there is no defacto standard since "the net" has a b2b and b2c aspect of things. In finance for instance, the b2b things are done with java and perl -- either for convenience or interpolating with other machines. The b2c stuff are done in c++ and java typically. And even then, it's usually the right tool for the right job. i.e. perl for dealing with systems that are internally complex in the grand design of things.

I worked with php for 4-5 years, and the more i worked with it, the more ugly the design flaws appeared. The only theing wrong with perl's designs, are the innards (from what i hear) and actually writing a parser against the language from scratch. Other than that it is a very real programming language that isn't going away.