PURL over PHP

Anon

Hey,

I had a job interview last week at a big international web company which is the market leader for their field.

They told me they had used PHP once, but now they only use purl because it can do so much more.

They said that PHP was good for interchanging bwteen HTML and PHP within the same file,
but they need some big data structures, like linked-lists within linked-lists which Purl can do but Php cannot.
Also custom modules, open-source, and mysql-integration were features which they claim Purl shares.

Are they correct in saying this? That Purl has much more functionality? Because I had never used Purl I was not able to justify myself for prefering PHP.

Anon

Perl is a very robust language, it is much older than PHP so it has many more extensions to it. PHP is fairly young, and doens't have quite as many extensions. However saying that Perl is more functional than PHP isn't quite true. I believe that everything that Perl can do can be done in PHP, it just might be harder to implement.

I like Perl and PHP, but I perfer PHP because it has a better structure than Perl. Perl was orignially written as a text processing language to replace sed, awk, and grep. It's since grown into a much more functional language. While this is good for the language it's basis causes there to be many esoteric operators that work well for text processing, but make code look bad and be harder to maintain. This isn't to say that you couldn't write good readable code in Perl, just that the language doesn't lend itself to that naturally. See: www.perlmonks.org to learn some about it.

Anon

In a web environment the only thing PERL does better than PHP that I know of is heavy string manipulation and regex work. However with PCRE and the Zend engine I can't find a reason to use PERL over PHP.

PERL exceeds PHP in it's non-web based uses such as networking and console scripting, however for a web master that never enters the picture.

If I was hiring a SysAdmin I'd want Perl, C, C++, and Java knowledge. If I wanted someone to take care of my website the only skills that are required is java, javascript, html, and PHP.

Check out Zend.com's article on a site that chose PHP over Perl (paycheck.com I think), and you'll get the picture.

I use PHP for it's sheer ease of readability, maintainability, and quick production time.

Every time I start a project it seems I end up requiring some rarely used feature I have to learn how to use. With PHP it takes me a few quick looks at the manual and a few minute of code testing to learn it thoroughly, but just figuring out what I needed in PERL would of taken far longer.

But the true test of a language tends to come down to personal preference. I just like the way PHP "looks and feels".

If two teams of equal ability and experience are building a web application, one using PHP and one using PERL, both outcomes will be pretty much equivalent.

So it all comes down into a more or less unjustifiable choice. Kind of like becoming a republican rather than a democrat wink

frymaster

Perl has cpan which makes life a lot easier. Sometimes it's better to find a module to solve your problem than to solve it yourself, although there are code-portability issues.

I think that PHP is very close to perl in it's string-manipulation features. enough so that it's not a compelling argument for perl anymore. it's also easier to use your C skills with strings in PHP (which, being an masochist, i do).

Linked lists in PHP are almost undoable (well, certainly not worth the trouble) and the annoying propensity to clone rather than copy references is just plain stupid... score one for perl.

perl's syntax is so atrociously non-standard that (so i'm told) dennis ritchie pushed larry wall down the stairs at comdex 96 and yelled "stuff that up yer @[0] =~ /(.+)/s;"(1)

notes:
(1) actual perl snippet to parse comments out of HTML

-frymaster

[deleted]

PERL is very powerfull, but PHP is gaining strength rapidly.
If you know PERL well you can do everything PHP can do, and if you know PHP you can do everything PERL can do.

So it comes down to ease of use.
Personally I find PHP syntax easier to understand than PERL syntax, but that's a persional opinion.

The major difference is that PHP can be included inside HTML pages, where PERL is a script that simply prints an HTML page. That means that PERL scripts must reside in the CGI bin directory and that makes it seperate from the HTML documents. PHP code is right inside the HTML pages, so you can put them wherever you like.

PHP was designed specifically to be used for webpages, whereas PERL was around before the web became popular. Thus PHP has some built-in tricks, like reading checkbox formdata as arrays, and being able to get the POST and GET vars as arrays. This is all possible with PERL too, but you'd have to include the code in every script. PHP does it for you automatically.

So for use with the Web, PHP is very very strong.
But for system maintenance ect, where you don't need the fancy HTML stuff, PERL would probably be a better choice.