Re: PHP Question

[Michael Ludwig <mi...@gmx.de>]

Jim Schueler schrieb am 29.02.2012 um 09:04 (-0500):

> When someone asks me the difference between PHP and Perl.  I usually
> respond that the PHP's core API is bigger by a magnitude of 2.  I
> estimate the core PHP api is around 10K functions.

Don't exaggerate. :)

PHP is dull and boring. Not an inspiring language. Still, they got at
least two things right that Perl didn't:

(1) The interpreter could be *safely* and *easily* run in a persistent
(non-CGI) scenario, allowing web hosters to deploy it en masse, hence
making it available to basically everyone.

(I'm not expert enough to tell the difference between PHP as FastCGI
or Apache module without bytecode cache ("accelerator") on one hand,
and mod_perl in "PerlRun" mode on the other, but I would certainly
appreciate an outline of the pros and cons of both modes, or pointers
to such, or even a precise assessment of the differences. I seem to
have a vague recollection of some discussion by people in the know
stating that php.exe maintains less global state than perl.exe and
is therefore safer to host in a multi-client scenario.)

(2) PHP introduced well-known OO syntax into the language, including
keywords "class", "interface", "abstract", "final", "public", private"
and "protected". I do prefer that to Moose because I already know how
it works and how to deal with it. (With Moose, there's just too much
figuring out how you're supposed to be using it. There's too many
features.) So "dull and boring" isn't always bad.

A third thing has, I think, vastly contributed to PHP's success, and
that is its webbiness, coming with $_SESSION out of the box and being
itself a template language. So luring many people in. Wouldn't count
that among the virtues of PHP, but certainly among its advantages in
the webdev marketplace.

-- 
Michael Ludwig