FAQ - Perl or PHP
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-02-11 07:27:09 - Graham Ellis"Do you prefer Perl or PHP?".
That's a question that would go high up my FAQ if I maintained one. But there's no easy answer; "it depends".
PHP is a fabulous language for use with web site work and embedded there. Rasmus Lerdorf and all the others involved have done a fantastic job in coming up with something that's more than just a language and provides a set of tools that let you provide amazing server side functionality. If I'm tasked with writing a web site with a server side that's more than just plain pages, I'll use PHP these days.
Perl is a quite remarkable language. You'll notice that my initial comment does not say anything about "Internet" or "Web" because Perl is much, much more than that - a general language that I'm comfortable using for complex data anaysis tasks, Systems admin, and data management in all its various forms. This does mean that when used on the Web, Perl can do an excellent job, but it's likely to be a little more complex than using PHP since with Perl you need to filter out the bits you want from all the general stuff rather than having all those bits there and close at hand as the defaults like PHP does.
And I do need to add "have you thought of Python? For a computer professional's scripting language on projects that continue to develop and need to be flexibly modified, perhaps by a team, it has a LOT going for it.