We use PHP and Perl in our environments here, and are finding daily that
there is less and less need to use Perl for much of anything anymore. At
one point, the only holdup was forking stuff. PHP now has that. We have
been successfully creating various standalone multi-forking servers and
clients in PHP that access Postgresql, the network, and other resources
without a problem. There are thousands and thousands of CLI PHP code in
production over here.
In terms of language denseness... PHP has as much (and much more built
in) functionality as Perl, and if I dare to say so, is cleaner (though
not as elegent) to code in that Perl. There's not much available at CPAN
that is not already in PEAR, or over at PHPCLASSES. In fact, I would
say, that the only catching up that PHP has to do, is in having a great
resource such as CPAN.
PHP has long ago caught up with Perl, and I believe the the OOP features
available in PHP 5, will easily leapfrog over Perl. Having said that, we
still code a lot of Perl, simply because of inertia and an existing
codebase.
Best regards,
Ericson Smith
Developer
+-----------------------+----------------------------+
| http://www.did-it.com | "When I'm paid, I always |
| eric@did-it.com | follow the job through. |
| 516-255-0500 | You know that." -Angel Eyes|
+-----------------------+----------------------------+
Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>>>"scott" == scott marlowe <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>
>scott> This is simply not true. PHP comes in both a web ready
>scott> embedded version, as well as a CLI version, and is quite
>scott> capable, even of handling things like streams and such, and can
>scott> even be used to write a daemon listening on a port quite
>scott> easily.
>
>But PHP is where Perl was five years ago, and continually plays
>catchup. If you want real work done, use the right tool. PHP is fine
>for nifty web pages for smallish sites, but Perl takes over when the
>real heavy lifting is needed.
>
>scott> Just because it (probably) hasn't been used to write such a
>scott> system doesn't mean you couldn't do it in PHP.
>
>You could do it in assembler too. But why?
>
>To keep from wasting precious human cycles, you need something with
>the code density and flexibility of Perl or better. Python, Ruby,
>that league. Not C, not Java, not PHP.
>
>
>
