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in reply to Re: Perl Popularity
in thread Perl Popularity

Downturn.. don't know. I suspect it's being used less and less. I probably wouldn't be able to prove that, though, since I doubt the figures are being collected. Claims about it being the most popular web programming language are fairly unbelievable though (Programming Web Services with Perl, O'Reilly).

As for PHP being easier for an ISP - yes, I totally utterly agree. I kind of alluded to it. I would be interested to know what you think in mod_perl 2 solves this issue though: I've not seen anything about that. mod_perl has a rep for being very difficult to program, and my experience with it goes along with that.

When I was talking about the Gnome2 situation being crazy; what I meant was this: Perl has these great Gnome2 bindings. But, I don't see any Gnome2 apps being written in Perl. I totally don't believe someone would want to write a Gnome2 app in C rather than Perl. There must be other reasons why people don't find it appealing. I just can't put my finger on it... other than, it feels culturally 'wrong'. I think distribution has been a problem (i.e., getting people to install the modules), but PAR solves that. But then, I've not really seen that used in anger either.

PHP I have the hardest time with. It's horrible. The language is foul, and PHP-GTK is clearly evil. In terms of right tool for right job, PHP is just wrong for scripting and apps. It's not even that it's easier to learn than Perl either; because I don't believe it is (maybe the sigils disrupt things slightly...I don't know). For all the crack in Perl 5, there are an awful lot of warts on PHP.

I completely agree about the bad code thing. I recently helped someone having a problem with a Perl CGI script, and it was failing because it couldn't find cgi-lib.pl to require it. This script was first written in 2001, and last touched this year. Nasty code will be written in any language. However, examples of good code don't really seem to abound :/