The arguments used pretty much all seem rather fallacious! Experience here is that PHP is much slower than mod_perl - thats what you call comparing apples with apples. PHP is, after all, an Apache module.

They even admit in their analysis that much of the module support they currently enjoy with Perl will be unavailable - they will have to write it for themselves and contribute it to PEAR if they want to have it to use. Nwo that is good for everybody - make more of it to spread it around.

But really, those of us who have to work both sides of the fence know which is better, which has fewer bugs, which is more extensible. The question they are aksing is not "which is the better place for us to be technologically" what they are really asking is "how many of our users who may want to hack this thing are PHP scripters, versus programmers capable of using Perl5?".

Every day I see examples of poorly written PHP scripts out there, some of which are actually more security hole ridden than the infamous Matt's Script Archive! I see these things because my office is getting more and more calls from people who rejected our "higher priced" Perl solutions and went with PHP. Now I have to admit, that I do see some really good PHP stuff too! Just not very much of it at all.

Don't worry, Perl wont disappear, nor will PHP. Perl has a long history of capabillity which spans pretty much any aspect of computing you can think of. PHP started out in one small niche of the ocmputing market and is working out from there. Give them time, they will catch up. But obviously the Apache Foundation wouldn't be working on Perl and PHP as well as Java based systems if they thought one was going to triumph now would they?

jdtoronto