revisiting web development in Perl...where to start?

[Nathan Keel]

Ack. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. While it's not
guaranteed that most of the PHP coders out there have PHP as their
first language, I'll be a lot of them do - which is why they code in
PHP. From my professional experience, the closest most web designers
get to a programming language is either HTML (and many don't learn
that too well) or Flash (which isn't a programming language, though
Actionscript is, and 3.0 is actually a fairly respectable one - did I
write that?).

Both PHP and Perl suffer from being languages that are easy to start
learning, but difficult to build out in. They tend to breed
overconfidence from novice programmers, as sometimes exhibited on this
very newsgroup and its sister comp.lang.php. The fault, though, isn't
in the languages. It's in the programmer who fails to design, fails to
recognize limits, fails to ask before leaping. (And, really, which one
of us hasn't been that programmer at one time or another?)

From my experience, there's a lot of unskilled people out there coding
in Perl too - it's just that their scripts stay in their home
directories on their servers rather than being served for the whole
world to judge.

EMH, JAP{HP,erl}H

Perhaps, but when PHP scripts usually don't relate to needing to
understand outputting the right content type/headers or have specific
permissions to work, and can more easily have the user add code
directly into what they otherwise see as just an HTML document, they
tend to gravitate toward that and can get away with knowing less (from
their point of view) to get things to work. This often leads to other
problems, but certainly it exists in any language, including Perl. I
don't mind PHP that much, but it seems wonky compared to other
languages, it feels less serious and has a lot more bugs and security
issues than most others. One can attribute security findings to the
popularity of it, but that's bullshit when people say that (i.e., more
Windows exploits than Linux, but more web sites run on Linux, so that
doesn't hold true, unless you're talking about desktop related
exploits). But, the bugs, the bugs... Anyway, yeah, all languages
have their unskilled people and there were certainly a lot of what you
could call Perl scripts by Matt Wright that were floating around for
many years causing many people a lot of misery.

 

[krakle]

s/walla/voila/

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