Freelance Forums

To me PHP was a lot easier to learn and seems to be faster then Perl...

What do you think?

Johnny

I don't know much Perl. But when it came to learning one or the other I went with PHP mainly because I know more people that knew it. That way if I needed help they were there. But they also felt it was easier to learn.

IT depends from app to app. I prefer perl for server side projects. I just use php for web side projects.

Regards

I don't do anything with the servers. So since someone else handles all of that was another reason I learned PHP. But in the long run I would really like to know both well.

I never had any interest in Perl. All the pre written scripts/forums I used are in PHP so that is what I decided to learn and you can pretty much guarantee your host supports it.

Something else that can be said about PHP is that is very similar to Java in programming syntax. So if you know Java PHP is not that hard to pickup.

Johnny

I use PHP because of better database and webserver combination, php, mysql, apache. THE tightest configuration of web-programming utilities.

Yup, I haven't tried to learn Perl. I know php though.

Perl and PHP are quite different. I started in Perl back in the days and had alote of fun with it. It's easy once you get right in it.

Perl is mainly used for CGI applications, more for backend processing not really meant for Web page processing and display. I'm not saying that you can't it's just not a nice and can be a pain to debug.

As for PHP, it's a faster language to learn and excellent for servers that handle many hundreds of people at once. PHP is lightweight and uses alote less resources. PHP is much better suited to parse and display web pages.

I'm not sure I agree here. They are both server side languages and neither provide an API's to render pages. That is still all done in HTML/CSS/Javascript. To say one is better at displaying pages than the other seems odd to me.

Johnny

I think PHP wins hands down, it is so much more common and has such more uses.

Actually it is alot more like C than Java...PHP has it's roots in C.

I learned PERL first and found it ok but later when learning PHP I liked it much more.

PHP is sort of a mix of PERL and C

I love PHP!