Re: PHP vs Perl

[Robert Citek <rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org>]

Short answer: both.

On Wednesday, Aug 4, 2004, at 15:31 US/Central, Ken Keefe wrote:
> I personally am not afraid of code, in fact I am more afraid of taking 
> the easy way and therefore not knowing what is going on in the 
> background. For right now, I want to be able to write message boards, 
> account systems, and other web apps that work with MySQL.  But I want 
> to also prepare myself with skills that will be very valuable 
> commercially in the years to come. So, should I keep heading for PHP 
> or should I reconsider Perl?

In the web world, they work slightly differently.  With perl you write 
code to generate all the HTML.  With PHP you embed your PHP within the 
HTML.  If you want to quickly get up to speed with LAMP (Linux, Apache, 
MySQL, PHP/Perl/Phython) stuff, then start with PHP.  PHP's strong 
points: has an easy learning curve, is meant for the LAMP niche, and 
enables you to build useful web apps quickly.  To wit: php-nuke, 
post-nuke, phpwebsite, phpmyadmin, phpbb, NOLA, etc.

Perl is for everything else.

If you want to be valuable for years to come, learn lisp or a 
lisp-variant like scheme (or guile - comes with most linux distros).  
Not so much for the language, but rather for how it shapes how you 
think about programming problems, which is what you are really getting 
paid for.

Just my $0.000002.

Regards,
- Robert


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