> the bigest problem with perl based solutions is ...perl. Perl is great > provided a) you already know it well, b) you never need to fix it. Anyone > new to scripting languages should probably not start on perl if they can > help it. At first it will confuse and frustrate you, and eventualy render > you indispensable as the only person in the company with half a chance of > decrypting all the perl code you've written. > > Not wanting to start a language war... all popular languages are good and > vise-versa... for their particular task. Everyone should learn them all. I'm > not convinced anything big is perls particular task... but quick and dirty > stuff...yeah. >
Heh, those are good comments for a language war. :) Even if you don't want to start it. Personally I like perl. It's way more robust then anything outside of the compiled languages. It's worth knowing because the applications for it are much more vast then PHP. I find php much like vbscript. Admittedly I stopped using it when it was version 3.x, so I don't know if 4.x is any better. In version 3.x my biggest problems was the lack of any design to enhance tiered or scalable development. If you want to build a db driven website then you were required to use db dependent functions. That truly sucks. The dbi concept in perl is much more mature. I can't speak about python, I know perl why would I need it? As Craig said, and I endorse, "why bother learning a language ( .... ) suitable for web applications when for about the same effort you can learn a general purpose language that can be used for web applications, systems administration, any kind of data mangling, and other general scripting tasks?" Cheers, -- Lance Levsen, Systems Administrator, PWGroup - Saskatoon