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

[chargrill]

I had a remarkably similar conversation with someone just last night. She is slightly technical, I think she does something like "business strategy" or "marketing" or some other nonsense. Somehow we were talking about programming languages; naturally I mention Perl. And she says "Oh, it's old, does anyone actually use that anymore? I thought everyone used ASP, .NET, and...." (she may have listed some more, but I was pretty nonplussed at the time). I had to explain that it was alive and well, it's being used for some very advanced stuff (naturally it's automating a lot of the manual processes at my job, but I also recently attended a lightning talk about a guy doing real time trading applications(!) with Perl).

I further told her that at the end of this very month, there's a North American conference exclusively for Perl (and I'm doing what I can to help out with it, as I am now call myself a Chicago Perl Monger.

It's not just PHP, but all that other stuff. jsp, asp, etc. Perl is definitely (among some) given a very bad rep. And I really have no idea why.

[phaylon]

Perl is definitely (among some) given a very bad rep. And I really have no idea why.

I have an idea on why this happened, though it really isn't more than just an idea. Since the beginning of time humans liked to talk about stuff they don't know or understand. Someday someone said "Perl is just for text processing," and someone else said "Perl is ugly line-noise." And that just sticked. All over the world this urban legend is repeated, mostly by people that never have seen a Perl program or talked to a Perl developer.

With such a biased view, it doesn't even matter if someone even ever happened to look at some Perl code. Because: of course it will look like line-noise to them. It has all those weird chars and doesn't seem at all like $random-language-they're-writing-guestbooks-in.

And now, many years later, it's just fixed in peoples minds. I have even met "militant" perl-enemies, who can't accept that Perl might not be the way they're picturing it. I usually stop the conversation when the other side runs out of arguments and starts with ad-hominem or mocking attacks. One of the first arguments is often that there's too many ways in Perl. It's not that they have a simple problem and want a simple solution. It's not that they have a project on such a low level that it isn't needed to evaluate strategies and design decisions. According to those people, there are just too many ways. Period. If you don't accept that, you're wrong.

But the most outstanding thing in all those discussion is that it is built to (estimated) 90% on prejudice. But it sticks and it will stick, because there are too many Perl experts out there that have never seen any line of Perl in their life.