use Perl

• Yep (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  mod_perl isn't getting web developers because it isn't a web application framework. PHP is.

  Perl is like Lisp. We have the base language, on which we write the language in which we will write our program. I'm sure people who truly grok Lisp and all of Paul Graham's stuff will say Perl doesn't completely fulfill this, but I think it does partially. We create, at least, a hybrid language that consists of Perl + whatever modules we deem necessary.

  Look at the way everyone writes their own templating sys

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:Yep (Score:1)

    by memerman (5316)

    This all reminds me of the deal with Gods who die off if nobody believes in them anymore. There's something to that. Perl can't afford to be too nonchalant about PHP else the masses will continue to flock to PHP in the vacuum of Perl ignorant-friendliness.

    PHP can grow organically, increasing its sphere of usefulness, just like Perl did. More and more Perl may become like Latin -- forgotten by the modern day unwashed and just a curious field of study for ivory tower eggheads. Not that there's anything
    • Re:Yep (Score:2)

      by jdavidb (1361)

      But for those of us who use Perl for completely non-web related things, we could care less if Perl beats out other languages in the webapp space. The right tool should be used for the job. If PHP does the job better, great!

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • Re:Yep (Score:1)

        by Yoz (2457) on 2004.09.20 10:08 (#34495) Homepage

        "we could care less if Perl beats out other languages in the webapp space" IMHO, we should be caring a whole lot more. The main reason that Perl took such a big lead in the early days of webapp development was that the webapp problem domain fits so perfectly in Perl's target areas of expertise (rapid development and other dynamism, text munging, database interfaces, etc.) Plus, there's Perl's mission statement: "Makes easy things easy and hard things possible." Webapp development is definitely on the easier side of things. The fact that a language as bad as PHP4 can stomp all over Perl in this regard should be a major cause for concern. Were it real-time 3D rendering or mission-critical embedded systems, we'd have a better excuse. But webapp dev is an area in which Perl should be able to beat PHP with one arm missing. We shouldn't be saying, "Okay, so we're not particularly good at that domain, but it's not a problem." We should be saying, "Jeez, if we can't even get *that* right..."

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