From: "Byrne Reese" <[email protected]>It amazes me that this entire
thread neglects to mention PHP. Granted,
it started with a discussion about web frameworks, for which PHP does not
have a strong footing, unless of course you count Drupal and Wordpress
and the like among such "frameworks." But still, PHP cannot and should
not be ignored.
Well, Drupal is not a framework but a CMS, and WordPress is a kind of CMS
used for creating blogs.
I have tested more PHP frameworks but most of them really sucks. I think
that CodeIgniter was the one I liked the most, but it is still very far
behind Catalyst.
The ORM it uses is not so advanced as DBIx::Class, and it doesn't allow
using other ORMS, it doesn't have features for using more templating systems
easy, it has a strange and hard to use form processor, the URL dispatching
is more limited and harder to use...
In my experience in working on Movable Type, PHP is the single biggest
source of competition on the market because it has the lowest barrier to
entry and has the largest mind share. Say what you will about PHP
developers, but they are a dime a dozen these days and they are about as
ubiquitous as HTML/CSS developers.
That's true, but Perl programmers, especially those who create advanced
programs don't usually compete with those PHP programmers you are talking
about.
Perl still has some big issues if we want it to compete with PHP for that
kind of programs that can be easily installed on servers that offer web
hosting for free or for 3 dollars a month, because CPAN modules are not
built in the Perl package and are harder to install, or impossible to
install without root and shell access.
The problem is that maybe 99% of the web sites are that kind of web sites
that don't have their own server, or VPS, but use shared hosting, and less
and less free web hosting servers offer support for Perl because it can't be
really used anyway.
We were frequently confronted with this question/challenge by MT
customers: "we can't find *affordable* Perl developers to help us," or
worse, "we already have 10 people on staff who know PHP." What it boils
down to for most companies is "can I develop this thing with the staff I
have, or do I have to open up job reqs to get the talent I need?" or put
simple, "how much is this going to cost me?"
Put into these terms, PHP always looks cheaper on paper because chances
are there are people on staff who already know PHP, or the cost of hiring
a good Perl programmer is too high.
Byrne
For most of the web sites, this is very true.
If somebody who wants to make a web site that will be hosted on a share
hosting server for 5 dollars a month comes to me and asks me how much I ask
for making his web site, I can tell him that I can't make that web site
because I can't install a Perl framework on that server, I can't install
other perl modules I might need, and if he wants me to create the site for
him, he should pay 30 or 40 dollars per month for a VPS. Well, in that case
only this will mean too much, before telling him how much it costs.
A PHP programmer even if he wants to use a framework on a free hosting web
site, he could do it because he might find frameworks that can be installed
by just unarchiving a file, so even if that framework won't be as good as
Catalyst, it would be surely much better than what I can install on that
server.
So... Perl programmers target only bigger businesses and more important web
sites and this is a reason why the statistics are not very relevant.
If a site like Amazon uses Perl, it is just one web site, but it has a
traffic like a few thousands other small web sites.
The problem is that there are no very many big sites that use perl either.
I knew that Amazon used Perl, than tried to use Java, than... I don't know
what they use now.
Google uses Python, Yahoo uses PHP, Microsoft probably uses DotNet and Sun
probably uses Java.
I don't know other important sites that use Perl.
Even on www.perl.com, the link "Perl success stories" wasn't updated and
points to an O'Reilly web page that advertises some perl books.
There is a "Perl success stories" on O'Reilly's web site, but somewhere
else, and those success stories seem to be pretty old, much before the so
called Web 2.0 era.
If I'd need to compare Perl with a company, I'd say that his technical
department is very disorganized, but that it has the best results, however
its marketing and financial departments are dead. And by the way, this
company doesn't really follow the new standards that other companies use.
(And I am talking about the web services which aren't really compatible with
those offered by DotNet and Java, about the dot notation for separating
classes and objects, and even about the dollars and @, % signs that might
seem strange in these days because other languages don't use them.)
Octavian
