[thelist] PHP v Perl

[Joe Crawford]

Jeanne Edna Thelwell wrote:
> I've decided that I would like to use wwwthreads
> (http://www.wwwthreads.com) on my sites.  It's available in both Perl and
> PHP.  I downloaded and installed the Perl version and I'm happy with
> it.  What I was wondering was whether there was any advantage to using Perl
> rather than PHP or vice versa.  I'm not averse to learning PHP (and
> frankly, you don't really need to know PHP to install the scripts, since
> the instructions are pretty idiot-proof).
> 
> I know I'll want to learn PHP sooner or later, but the license costs $200
> for commercial sites (I've looked at the free boards and, for my purposes,
> it's worth paying for wwwthreads), and I need to make the decision about
> that now.

I was getting my hackles up there, the way that sentence is constructed
it looks like php costs $200 - which it does not. But I see you mean the
wwwthreads thing.

> So, besides personal preferences, are there advantages to PHP over Perl?

Broadly, authoring is simpler for PHP, and more geared toward the web.
Perl has more raw functionality and also kicks ass, but my preference
for web apps would definitely fall into PHP-land. (But I'm all
web-centric like that).

That said, there are some pretty damn cool open source Perl projects.

Oh, I can't decide for you. But if idiot-proof is a factor, PHP is much
more idiot-proof IMO.

This is a potentially contentious question (a la Mac v. PC, unix v. NT,
Dreamweaver v. Golive, emacs v. vi) - but hopefully that'll get you
thinking.

	- Joe <http://artlung.com/>
-- 
...................  Joe Crawford \\ Web Design & Development
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