On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 09:50:08AM -0700, Jeff Lambert wrote:
> I know Perl is widly used for various tasks but I'm wondering if it is worth
> learning now that there are other languages like PHP. Can anyone give me some
> things that Perl can do that PHP can't?
The main reason that I have no plans to learn PHP and plan to comtinue using
perl (and C and Ruby), is that PHP is specialized for web, whereas Perl and
the other languages mentioned are general-purpose languages. Perl will help
you with system administration, for example, in a way that PHP never will.
PHP has far fewer modules available than Perl.
On the other hand, if you don't care about system administration and never
plan to do any programming that is not for the web, PHP is fine.
My Perl and PostgreSQL for the web talk has a longer discussion of perl's
advantages and limitations, including some tools that get around the
limitations. Available at: <http://romana.hajhouse.org/linux/dbi.pdf> (file
may look fuzzy in Acroread because Adobe's product doesn't fully implement
their own font standard. Best viewed in xpdf or GV.)
--
Henry House
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