After developing a large amount of PHP pages I've come to the conclusion that PHP's best advantadges aren't. It mingles with the html code, and in the beginning it's cute, when all your HTML is simple.

But when I wanted to do some serious design I found programs such as frontpage treat php tags as junk, and I ended up having 100% code php files and the whole page layout in a separate, editable file in which I perform variable interpolation. It seems kind of silly to use an html-embeddable language without embedding it.

I am now developing a meta search, in which several sites' search outputs are parsed. It uses threads, tons of regexps, tons of hashes, and makes http requests. That's four things PHP can't do.

All in all, PERL (and mod_perl) feels like a pro language, and PHP feels amateur. When your PHP script dies, it spits lots of errors to the browser. Shameful. mod_perl returns a 500 error and logs the messages.

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