I love perl, I love perl... but does perl have any advantages over PHP?
Many. (1) It makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible. (2) CPAN. (3) Its a very forgiving language unless you want it to be ruthless about what it accepts. (4) Its not limited to the web. Perl was "the systems admin" language long before it became "the web language". Its obviously neither exclusively, but rather a language that makes a good fit for lots of "glue"-type situations. Perl is the duct tape of the Internet. PHP is the cheap dime store celophane tape that dries up after a few weeks.
Is it time for me to learn PHP?
Not unless you're trying to broaden your work opportunities.
Any thoughts?
PHP is an absolutely abomination that was ill-conceived and iller executed. It started off as a watered down Perl and its grown to be a vast library of poorly thought-out functions. So its become the defacto language for people that are scared by Perl to try to write webapps in. The results have been horrific as another poster indicated. Numerous absolutely awful PHP open source projects exist. The few "good" PHP projects are still a real chore to deal with because of lack of flexibility in database backends without rewriting every database interaction and the tendancy to have the PHP write too much of the HTML so that your designers have to learn PHP to fix look and feel issues.
If you're looking at learning something consider Apache::ASP. It brings the good parts of the ASP/PHP web development paradigm into a Perl context. We've been doing heavy development with it and I'm quite pleased with the increase in productivity over more traditional CGI/mod_perl development that we've been doing for ages.
-- </chris>
"Fans of Mozilla's free, open-source Firefox browser make the ardent Apple faithful look like a bunch of slackers." - Rebecca Lieb at clickz.com
