Juerd++
I normally don't like the VI vs. emacs, Windows vs. Linux, Perl vs. PHP discussions, but for this article i'll make an exception.
Let us just not forget that PHP is very popular and 80% of it users really don't care about these shortcomings because it is just very easy to use.
In all fairness, the author could also have made some points where PHP is better than Perl. | [reply] |
In all fairness, the author could also have made some points where PHP is better than Perl.
There isn't a single thing about the PHP programming language that is better than in Perl. Yes, some things are different, like PHP 5's new OO system, but that doesn't automatically mean it is better.
The things in which PHP excels all have to do with its use as a templating-like language, integrated in Apache. And those are things that Perl doesn't do AT ALL, so a comparison would be weird already. There is no popular PHP-like Apache integration that uses Perl. mod_perl is far too powerful and dangerous to let loose on bulk hosting servers, but PHP lacks the power to configure Apache. mod_php and mod_perl do very different things, while PHP and Perl are both programming languages. A comparison showing which of the Apache modules is better would be wrong.
The author would like to learn where you think PHP is better than Perl, though. And he accepts well written patches to the document in question.
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I think it is easier to start scripting in PHP than it is in Perl. If you are a complete n00b, you don't know where to find this "Perl interpreter" that you have to put on the first line after a cryptic "#!". If your provider has set up PHP for you, you can rename a .html file to .php and you have your first working php script (well... in a sense that is).
Also, in PHP if i want to create in image, i can do that out-of-the-box. No modules to find, download, make, make test, make install, import. It just works. I remember when i wanted to work with images in Perl i was totally intimidated by the amount of choice i had. Not to mention that i had never heard of "make".
So what everybody already knows about PHP (its easy of use) is a forte. It is also probably why so many people use PHP.
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