[plug] Perl vs PHP

[Christian]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 03:37:49PM +0800, Joshua Pierre wrote:
> Sorry for Outlook :)
> 
> But, perl often gets slow and bogged down when there are lots of requests or
> threads running and php is much faster so if you are doing something
> intensive with lots of hits or something I reccoment php.

Do you have any benchmarks to back this up?  I can't imagine any
significant difference between something mod_perl based and something
PHP based.

As for my take on which to use...  Someone previously suggested you
learn Perl if you were going to use it for something else otherwise
learn PHP.  In some ways this is probably good advice but I would flip
it around.  If you learn Perl then you have the option of using it for
many different things -- it's not a dead-end web scripting language like
PHP.  Perl can do everything PHP can do (I personally prefer Embperl for
web scripting) and many, many times more.  With Perl you are learning a
generic tool that you can use for many different things and, in this
industry, who knows what they will be doing in a few years time?  If, in
five years time, the predominant application architecture of the
Internet changes from HTTP to something else then your Perl code likely
won't require wholesale changes.  On the other hand, your PHP may very
well be useless.