Recently at work, a brief discussion with a co-worker about Perl vs. PHP encouraged me to do some “reading” about the topic.
Honestly, I had never really considered that people were still using Perl on a regular basis for web applications in the year 2007. However, my research quickly proved contrary. Truthfully, I haven’t touched Perl since I was a freshman in College nearly six years ago, so I suppose I’m a tad out of the loop.
This is what I can say though. Perl is powerful, I’ve always known that. See… I admit it, I respect Perl.
However, my life as a web developer is easier with PHP (and associated frameworks) than it would be with Perl, at least in my humble opinion. In fact, if you consider my recent switch to CakePHP (a powerful & flexible PHP framework), I’d venture to say that I could never get the amount of rapid work, prototyping, and other efforts completed if I was forced to use Perl; no matter how many Perl modules I had access to.
I know it’s not fair of me to say that (since I’m no Perl expert), but still… if you are a die-hard Perl addict, you should take a moment to try PHP for your web applications; and take extra care to try CakePHP. I’m betting you’ll be blown away by the time you save and the efficient code you generate.