[thelist] Perl vs. Other tech

Kelly Hallman khallman at wrack.org
Tue Nov 12 13:40:54 CST 2002


On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
> A client and I were having a small discussion about Perl and how it
> compares with PHP, ASP and JSP middleware. We are doing this job with
> Perl, and it seems to me its a real pain to do a lot of things that are
> just super simple in PHP for example.

Perl is the "Practical extraction and report language" and it's great for
text processing, generating reports, etc.  There isn't much you can't do
with Perl, but I wouldn't say it's the best tool for a lot of those jobs.

PHP is designed mostly as a web platform; what Perl does for text
procsesing, PHP does for the web.  In other words, it is honed for web
development and makes typical web development tasks very easy.

You could write your own Perl libraries that would make things easier for
what you're trying to do, or you could check CPAN (search.cpan.org) --
there is most likely modules-o'plenty for whatever you need.

I used to do mostly Perl, but when I found PHP it was hard to go back to
anything else for web development tasks.  I still utilize Perl a lot for
quick offline tasks, cron jobs, etc.

To be cliché, it's one of those right tool for the job things!

--
Kelly Hallman
http://wrack.org/






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