Perl vs. PHP
I learned PHP in January and February of this year, using it for a couple of websites that I’ve written (including this blog). Over the course of several projects, I’ve become pretty familiar with the language, the online documentation, and all the in’s and out’s of PHP. I also first touched perl at the beginning of this year, but only for a short little project. This summer, most of the programming I’ve done at work has been in perl, so I’ve gotten quite familiar with it as well. Now that I know both of these pretty well, I have a little more flexibility in designing and implementing my ideas. That being said, every time I start a project, I have to think about which language is ideal. Now, I’ve gotten pretty good at this, and I know when to use perl over PHP and vice versa.
For web scripting, I prefer PHP. I really like that PHP can be embedded into html. It’s really quick and easy to write some pretty powerful web pages with PHP, and I’m a lot more comfortable with web forms in php over perl. I also have an incentive to write web sites in php, because my local server doesn’t actually execute any perl scripts called by the browser. So for most of my web stuff, I use PHP.
On the other hand, shell scripts are a lot easier to write in Perl. With perl, it’s really easy to interact with the shell and execute shell commands, and I also like that you can easily pass in arguments when you call a perl script from the command line. What’s more, with the default file handlers in perl, it’s easy to take inputs and have a more interactive shell script in perl. Although both languages have the capabilities to run through the shell, I just find it a lot easier in perl.
I also prefer perl for text-processing, most because it’s a lot easier to use regular expressions in perl. They “~” syntax is very simple, and a lot more readable than the “preg” functions in php. I also find it a lot easier to work with files; the perl file-handle data type makes reading and writing to files really clean. Again, PHP has all the same functionality as perl, it’s just a lot easier in perl, which is why I prefer it for text-processing.
Along the same lines, XML parsing is a lot easier to do in perl. Actually that’s the reason why I decided to write this article. I used to be parsing my xml feeds to this site using PHP’s xml parser, but have recently switched to a perl parser that I wrote yesterday. Because perl has such extensive libraries (i.e. CPAN) there’s less need to re-invent the wheel in perl than there is in PHP. PHP is a pretty powerful language, but because perl has a huge developer community that contributes to CPAN, a lot of functionality is constantly being added to Perl, while PHP isn’t such a dynamic language. In that respect, I prefer to use perl for a lot of things.
So why use php at all? For one thing, php is a higher level language. Most of my code remains pretty clean and tidy, and I don’t have to worry about a lot of minor issues, like variable declarations, that I do have to worry about in perl. I also like how php function declarations include the input parameters, whereas in perl they’re passed in to the special @_ array. PHP is quite a bit simpler to use than perl, so I prefer it when I don’t need the additional power of perl.
Recently, I’ve taken to using perl over PHP because I’ve been using perl a lot more recently and I find that I can do everything that I want to in perl. In PHP, I still can do almost everything that I need to, but sometimes it’s a little syntactically awkward and messy, which is why I prefer perl. I’ve started to figure out which language is ideal for the task at hand. As I learn more languages (I’ve started looking at python), I’ll naturally be better equipped with solutions to a given problem, but it’ll be harder to decide which language to use. Personally, I see this as a good thing, because it’ll be a lot easier complete my tasks if I choose the correct tools.
Tags: languages, perl, php, programming