Some developers are comfortable with thier language of choice, while others are more into exploring. They look into the facts and structures behind other environments and make a comparison to what they already know. This is exactly what Nola Stowe gives us in her latest post on CodeSnipers.com with her comparison of PHP and Perl.
In recent months I've been moving away from PHP, a language for which I have developed in for 6 years. I was pretty content with PHP ... until I saw Ruby first, then made friends with some Perl geeks, realized they weren't all arrogant l33t language snobs and took another look at Perl. Hey, its kind fun! PHP had become boring and Ruby and Perl gave me a new challenge. At first, I only read them thinking "how can I do this in PHP.." and managed to get my company where I did PHP to send me to YAPC. But after a time, I realized I didn't like PHP anymore and I wanted to do Perl or Ruby.
She mentions a brief previous article comparing datatypes in PHP and Perl and continues it with more details on differences between the two, including:
- parameter order issues in functions
- CPAN versus PEAR
- the availability of the test-more in Perl (actually, this exists for PHPtoo)
- Perl's simple documentation lookup
- and her opinion on the Perl-Critic module
