Slashdot: Perl Domination in CGI Programming?

[Boy Mozart]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Walter Pienciak wrote:

> 
>     http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/10/20/1246241.shtml
> 
> For those group members that are new
> to Perl, I thought it might be especially interesting,
> as many perceived pros and cons of Perl are being thrown
> back and forth.
> 

I'm very new to Perl, and I did find it interesting, mostly because the
prevailing views seem to run something like "Well, such-and-such languages
work better".  And there's a lot of different views in the articles as to
the purpose of Perl.  It's hard to follow sometimes, like the comments one
poster made that Perl isn't a "CGI language"--which it seems perfectly
suited for--and that it's "weak in areas such as GUI development".  I
don't understand the reference to GUI here.

I feel there were a lot of good arguments here for the use of Perl for
writing applications, just because it was necessary to come to Perl's
defense in some cases.

I've seen PHP mentioned in several places in these threads, but I've never
heard of it before today.  Does anyone here know what PHP is, and has
anyone had any experience with it?


-Randy.