I took a much needed vacation the latter part of last week. Prior to that, I was helping a few coworkers with getting PHP Web Applications developed on Fedora Core 5 to run on CentOS 5 with upgraded PHP, Apache, and libraries. Every time I work with PHP, it gives me serious perspective as to why the Modern Perl / Enlightened Perl / perl5i Projects are incredibly important. The Matt’s Scripts Perl era needs to die. This stagnant snapshot has poisoned Perl’s reputation for too long.
The main difference between Perl and PHP, is writing maintainable, intelligent Perl is only slightly more work at first than writing horrible Matt’s Scripts style Perl. With PHP, writing decent PHP is possible, but it’s incredibly difficult. The majority of the PHP I’ve come across is code written by a web developer with no programming experience and the language design and direction accommodate that demographic. PHP’s language design gets in the way of writing sane, maintainable code. It’s not impossible, but you have to really, really want it.
When you write good Perl, the programming experience becomes easier, and more fun.
I’m trying to get back to my programming projects, and thus back to writing more on Perl. For now, understand that if you think Perl and PHP are the same beast, you’re wrong. I’ve been paid to develop both for periods of years. Perl is much more eloquent, evolutionary, and intelligent.
{ 2 } Comments
Just replace Perl by Python and PHP by Perl in your article and you get the standard inflammatory post we all hate.
Perhaps I never stumbled into the correct channels or cliques in the PHP Community, but I don’t see PHP doing much in the way of repairing the enormous problems. That said, PHP’s simplicity has been it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. Perl has a lot to learn from PHP in regards to marketing and adoptation.
My problem was less with PHP in general and more with a particular kludge of code left by a self-declared PHP Wizard.