In some respects I believe you are correct. Here are my 2cents...
1) It is really not good to enable mod_perl by default. Doing so would dramatically increase the size of the Apache binary. Enabling all scripts to run through Apache::Registry would break half the scripts that exist out there... Even the more backwards compatible form of Apache::Registry is going to require tweaking for probably some scripts and in the meantime would create a support burden for the ISP for sure as well as increasing the ISP memory requirements.
Also, mod_perl is a tool with access to Apache internals which can be security problem also (so that part would have to be turned off). mod_perl is more designed for power users. I do think that a beginner can be proficient without too many weeks of work but not the same learning curve (like 1 day) as plain CGI/Perl.
2) PHP has some very rich on-line resources available that also furthers the helping of people. mod_perl has tried to do the same but only since maybe last year or so? My dates may be wrong, but I saw this PHP vs mod_perl discussion on the mod_perl mailing list.I think most people looked at perl.apache.org THEN, and PHP's various websites and the difference in tutorial and sample code quality was overwhelmingly in favor of PHP back then. Since then, perl.apache.org has been revamped, but it takes a long time to change people's perceptions.
Sadly, (or perhaps justifiably so), documentation can make all the difference in the success or failure of an open source project. Not the code quality or architecture of the project.
3) In any case, to get close to the speed of PHP, you need mod_perl (which is arguably faster than PHP), but to get close to the user-friendliness/learning curve of PHP, you have to stay in the world of CGI. Although this is my opinion, I believe this, at least, to be arguably true.
4) It's not just that something has a big corporation behind it that can make it a success. It's also your "partners" and how big they are. ISPs, for example, would be the "best friend" for any technology to have.
Unfortunately for Perl, I would not be surprised if the ISPs have had a hand in pushing PHP's success. Given that PHP will consume less resources than launching CGI shells but allow any beginner to do so (as opposed to mod_perl), what ISP wouldn't want to encourage their users to use PHP instead of Perl/CGI? If they can handle 20 users on a box using Perl/CGI but 100 users on the same box if those users switched to PHP, it obviously helps the ISPs bottomline to have people use PHP. See my comment in #1... sadly, there is no way to easily enable mod_perl by default.
The list of ISPs supporting mod_perl has been growing, but it is still quite sparse..
5) I have done some PHP coding and found it extraordinarily easy to pick up. I wouldn't move to it however because I find that for my purposes CPAN is actually a big bonus. eg I am recently programming in bioinformatics field again after a hiatus in the financial world for 5 years...how many tools exist to integrate with bioinformatics tools in PHP? Maybe a few, but certainly compared to Java and PHP, Perl has libraries for that domain beat hands down. Even if the modules are not in CPAN, many websites have various bits of Perl libraries for accessing their bioinformatics tools. And so just continuing to use Perl makes a lot of sense. For me. :)
I think a lot of other people who advocate Perl in "one word: CPAN" probably feel the same as me though. And that is heartening. :)
Thanks, Gunther
Octavian Rasnita wrote:
Of course I will remain subscribed and I am not gonna start learning PHP immediately. I am thinking to learn it because in my country there are only 2 books for learning perl in my native language and even though I don't need them, there are very few perl programmers and almost no jobs for perl developers. There are even some programmers that just heard about perl but they don't even know too well what it is, and they are good programmers in their languages.
My problem is that I am used to work under Windows where no compiler is installed by default and where some CPAN modules don't even compile under this OS, and I cannot just jump and use Linux because Linux is not an operating system too accessible for the blind, and I am totally blind. Unfortunately I cannot try to solve this problem and start creating an accessible version of Linux then creating perl programs under this OS.
Perl is great because OF CPAN also, but there are very many modules that require Linux, some of them don't even tell this but the modules don't even want to compile under this OS.
I am not trying to convince somebody that PHP or Java is better than perl, but I am just trying to see what makes those programming languages so... "en vogue".
For example a programmer in Java can create not only java servlets or java server pages, but they can also create java applets and desktop programs with a graphical interface while this is not possible with perl. Internet Explorer, the most used browser can display java applets, but it doesn't support perl scripts and those perl scripts cannot create a graphical interface in the browser. perl can create descktop programs with a graphical interface using the Tk modules, but those modules are not accessible at all for the blind. They use some strange classes that print the form like a picture on the screen while Java programs can be made accessible with Java Access Bridge.
Well, see, these are perl problems, but perl doesn't have a company like Sun Microsystems to fight to solve them, and it doesn't have so many advertisers either. For example, after installing Apache under Windows, by default PHP is set to be accepted after instalation, but perl is not set and we need to add the "AddHandler" lines in the httpd.conf file in order to make it work.
It is very clear that Apache is promoting PHP and there are not very many companies that promote perl. I've started to find (very strange) web hosting providers in my country that offer PHP support and space for free and some of them unlimited traffic, but they don't offer perl support at all.
I am not sure that PHP is used more than perl now, but after 5 years... it will be used more than perl for sure.
Which could be the solutions? - To have some Tk classes that are accessible for people with dissabilities. - To be able to have the programs compiled as binaries (.exe under Windows) without needing to embed the perl interpreter in the code like with perlapp, or to have a kind of runtime environment - the perl interpreter installed separately, but without any other unneeded modules. - to have a very good development environment for programmers (I don't need it, but new programmers in this language is searching for such a thing) and it doesn't exist. (I've tried comodo of ActiveState, but it is not accessible for the blind like other programming languages environments) - To have precompiled modules for Windows and for other operating systems for much more packages than ActiveState has now. - To have a set of kind of standard modules for creating, editing and reading more file types that are precompiled and which can be installed easier and a set of modules for working on the web, comunicating with more merchant accounts, shopping carts... - to promote packages that contain perl, Apache, MySQL and possibly other tools for programmers, because most programmers that test their programs locally need them. ...
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