You Used Perl to Write WHAT?!

Esther Schindler writes "Developers spend a lot of time telling managers, 'Let me use the tool that's appropriate for the job' (cue the '...everything looks like a nail' meme here). But rarely do we enumerate when a language is the right one for a particular job, and when it's a very, very wrong choice. James Turner, writing for CIO.com, identifies five tasks for which perl is ideally suited, and four that... well, really, shouldn't you choose something else? This is the first article in a series that will examine what each language is good at, and for which tasks it's just plain dumb. Another article is coming RSN about JavaScript, and yet another for PHP... with more promised, should these first articles do well."

Comments

1 Page Version

[The_DoubleU]

http://www.cio.com/article/print/175450

Re:Bollocks

[VGPowerlord]

it isn't supposed to be used in CGI. Eh. Right.

I can think of a combination of three factors to support this assertion:

1. CGI.pm is a memory hog, so you really need some sort of acceleration.
   
2. mod_perl breaks if you look at it funny.
   
3. Any other way of speeding it up locks you into using that particular method, as you end up rewriting your scripts to use it. See: FastCGI or SpeedyCGI.

For all the things PHP does wrong, these are things that it has done right.