Is PHP better than Perl?

Anon

Hi,

To tell the truth, I'm interested to learn internet programming, but I'm still wondering which one is the best.

Do you think PHP is better than Perl and have a better future?
Why?

Can I use PHP to make a search engine?

Thanks for your response.

Regards,

loeng

Anon

no!
php is BAD!
no good!
i still do not know how to programm in php
amd i hate those manuals that do not say
press this and that
regards
Predrag from croatia

Anon

It all depends on what you learn first. They do a lot of the same things, with little differences.

Perl is hard to learn. It has a very large code base though, since it's been used for so long. A lot of programs are written in code. You can use it for web content or to run any kind of program on the server (web related or not)

PHP is new but has gotten huge, very fast. The code base is small, but growing because PHP is so easy to learn. It's very similar to C/C++. PHP is geared towards web design and interfacing with databases. It provides functions that simplify a lot of tasks.

You could create a search engine with PHP or Perl.

The only right answer is to learn both and use the one you like better. There are a lot more jobs out there for Perl programmers, than there are for PHP, because it's new.

My $0.02.

---JH

Anon

Nonsense, PHP is no more difficult to learn than any other language.
Furthermore, if the goal is dynamic web pages, PHP has built in a
lot of stuff that requires either a lot of hand-coding or finding the
right library in Perl. PHP is definitely C-like in its approach to things,
mind you, including the famous assignment-is-an-expression, so you
can make mistakes like this:

if ($some_form_field = '')

Being C-like is a great advantage if you know C, but if your only
previous programming experience is VB or TCL, then probably not...

Anon

Well, the way I got into programming was as such.

I bought the Learn Visual Basic 6.0 software, made by microsoft, and it was actually really good.

Made learning general programming pretty easy, but I still struggled with getting started on it.

Did it for a few weeks, got stuck, stopped, restarted about 2 months later and finished the whole course in a couple of weeks.

Fast forward to about a month later, got the Visual C++ course.

Some body lied on the pack-age...got stuck and stopped after 1-2 weeks.

Fast forward a little while, started learning Pearl.

Liked it. Loved it. Learned enough to work with it, and started in.

Started up learning CGI, and got enough there to start programming after about a week or so. (not the most pleasant thing to program in, is it?)

And before starting a rather large project in Perl, enter PHP.

I began scanning around php.net and zend.com, and read a few articles on introductions to PHP. Grabbed the downloadable HTML manual and read the majority of it.

Love it, love it, love it, hand me a donut, it really is a great language, hand me a donut.

To fill the relative gap, I started VB programming around 2-3 years ago.

If I could re-arrange the timeline, I would of started PHP way earlier. I'd reccommend it to anyone.

It scales better than perl, it's faster than perl, you don't need to search for annoying add on librarys to get sometimes basic functions (basic to PHP anyway...how many librarys do you have to add to perl to get hashing, fopen/fwrite/fget/put, encryption, graphic creation, seemless database interaction...can you even add all that to perl?), and because of it's similarity to some of the most powerful languages available- it make's a perfect stepping stone to other languages.

For me, PHP was definately the easiest language I've ever learned. The question is, was it because I've had that much previous programming experiance, or is it just because PHP is great?

I dunno, guess you have to decide for yourself, because I am a bit biased 😉

The thing to understand of course, is if your going to be a programmer your going to need to be proficient with computers first. If talk of Linux kernals and recompiling and distrobution if binarys confuses you, the art of programming languages will elude you persistantly.

Anon

Allow me to quote an idol:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

            -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Now, since I know what I'm talking about, let me say this: the scalability of a given application is not to a large degree dependent upon the language, but upon the developer. PHP is, in a web-based environment, comparable to Perl in terms of speed. PHP wins some, and it loses some in terms of speed. This is really irrelevant, since Perl was not originally intended for use as a CGI language, although it has adapted extremely well to that role.

As for 'annoying add-on librarys(sic)', it's obvious that Plutarck has either not had a great deal of experience with Perl, or in teaching himself the language, missed out on a great deal. File IO (fgets, etc) is built into the language, and is far more robust than PHP's. Database interaction is easily done with DBI/DBD, Perl uses the same GD library for image processing that PHP does, and as for cryptography, PHP relies on third-party libraries (mcrypt) for cryptography, while nearly all Perl cryptographic libraries are implemented with native code. You're a programmer, you tell me: which is better, a wrapper for third-party software, or native implementation?

What it comes down to is this: you can't compare apples and oranges, which means you can't say 'PHP is better than Perl' or even 'Perl is better than PHP'. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I dislike using Perl for web-based applications because working with CGI, even using CGI.pm, is an onerous task when compared to doing the same thing with PHP.
However, on the flip side, there are tasks which are easily tackled with Perl that simply cannot be done with PHP.
And as long as we're on this kick, what about C? Or Java? I can guarantee you that a CGI program written in C will be faster than a Perl or PHP program for the same purpose, and even though a Java program may be slower, you can do nifty things with AWT/Swing to give users a fancy GUI...

In short, don't limit yourself to what seems 'easy'; you'll take the short road, miss a lot of exposure to good programming languages and practices, and end up behind the curve. Do your research first, and then decide what the best road to take is. You'll regret just jumping in.

ramprasad_ap

Who says Php is faster than perl

Ok Your cgi-perl scripts are too bad to give u a slow page. But as far as string manipulation goes Perl is much faster than PHP ( At least as far as I Know)

I have written a function to return all possible distinct combinations of a word ( eg {a ,b , c ,ab, ac ,bc ,abc} for the word abc)

The function in PHP takes forever ( In fact it times out on my apache server) and the same algorithm & same input works cool on perl ( for an input as long as imperturbable )

You can mail me for my code

Anon

I curiosity was raised by the following statement:

However, on the flip side, there are tasks which are easily tackled with Perl that simply cannot be done with PHP.

As someone whose programming experience has been exclusively web based (javascript, vbscript, PHP/MySQL) I wondered what sort of non-web based uses is Perl good for?
I'm now being asked by my employers to get involved with Perl (I think because they're a bit scared of PHP and don't want to bother reinventing the wheel when they already have
ample Perl experience on board). I want a better excuse for learning Perl than 'my boss doesn't like PHP' - although some might say 'what better excuse could there be?'!

kparker

I can guarantee you that a CGI program written in C will be faster
than a Perl or PHP program for the same purpose

How much money are you willing to back up that guarantee with? A cgi program that was heavily dependent on associative-array-like functions could easily be faster in Perl or PHP if the C programmer rolled his own associative-array functions with a naive (e.g. linked-list) implementation. :-)