[thelist] Re: LAMP vs. Perl vs. Ruby on Rails

[Brooking, John]

Daniel LeVangie-Stricklen said:

> I know I've cut a pretty broad swath in the technological fabric 
> of web development; but I'd like to know if there are general 
> impressions of the accessibility if these varied 
> tools/methodologies for creating dynamic site content.  I am, in 
> practical terms, a n00b to this stuff, in that I haven't actually 
> coded anything in MySQL, Perl, Ruby, or PHP; however, I've read 
>
> So, again, the question is: is there an appreciable difference in 
> the accessibility and, separately, the ultimate utility, of any 
> of these scripting languages/technological approaches?
> 
> And, again, I understand that this is broad, so I imagine that 
> there has been such a discussion somewhere.  A quick Google 
> didn't do much good, so I thought I'd light up evolt toward my 
> evil goals.

Yes, it is a very broad question, and you're likely to get either very
broad answers, or maybe hardly any at all because of its lack of focus.
So I'm going to try re-framing your question, and maybe others here can
point you to the resources.

It seems like want you want is a beginner's guide to what type of
language each is, and what are its strengths and weaknesses in different
situations. To begin with, as you probably know, MySQL is a database
system, so you will using it *along with* some other calling language
like Perl or PHP, not instead of. As for Perl and PHP, you can use
either to interface with MySQL and output presentation code (such as
HTML), and both on the same site if you want, but more likely you'll
want to stick with one or the other. As to which you use, that's where
it becomes subject to your personal preferences, background, and
situation. I use Perl instead of PHP because I know Perl and I don't
know PHP, but that's admittedly a very superficial decision driver.
Someone who knows both can compare them for you, and there's probably
pages out there that do just that. So now you have something more
specific to Google for. Likewise to compare Perl and Ruby, or PHP and
Ruby. (I don't know Ruby, so I have no idea how appropropriate it may be
to compare them! :) )

But I will go ahead and put in my $.02 about Perl: I love how expressive
it is. Some are put off by the syntax, but it's not too bad if you
already know C-like syntax, including Java and JavaScript. The inventor
of Perl, Larry Wall, is also an amateur linguist, and Perl contains a
great many syntactical shortcuts for commonly-used structures, just like
natural language. This makes it very concise and (if you know the
idioms) easy to write and understand, IMHO. Two of Perl's mottos, with
which I agree, are "There's More Than One Way to Do It" (TMTOWDI) and
"Makes the easy things easy, and the hard things possible".

Hope all that helped.

- John
-- 


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