PHP or Perl?

[Anon]

I\'ve noticed that PHP and Perl are very similar, and I already know some Perl but am interested in PHP. Is it worth learning (i.e., enough advantages over Perl), or should I just stick with Perl for web programming?

[smarlowe]

I like Perl, but I hated being forced to always use regexps to do what I considered to be basic, simple string manipulation.

for something things, Perl is still great, and it has a ton of pre-written modules available to allow you to do strange and weird things, plus those modules are easily added and removed from the server they are on.

But, PHP has simpler syntax, and if what you want to do is already a built-in like pdf and image creation, or LDAP access, database access, etc... then php is a nicer choice because I believe it is easier to code in and makes more readable code.

[lawnmowerman]

One this I noticed you didn't mention, which I believe is one of the major selling points for PHP, is the fact that you don't need access to the server's cgi-bin and you can code directly inside premade HTML pages.

This 2nd fact makes it so much easier to work in a team environment where you have a web design team which designs the pages and then hands them off to you to add dynamic content.

While this can be done with Perl, it's pretty much necessary (unless you use templates) to wrap Perl around the HTML.

In my personal opinion, it is much easier to work in this kind of environment when the programmer embeds his/her code inside traditional HTML since, in my experience, the programmer probably knows HTML but the web designer almost definitely does not know Perl.

-Rich

[smarlowe]

Actually emb_perl and mod_perl give pretty similar functionality to PHP, but PHP integrates more cleanly into a web server since that's what it was designed to originally do. Also, mod_perl and emb_perl both tend to create some pretty heavy weight processes compared to PHP.