Needed an ultra quickie web thingie (could have done it with mod_autoindex, but felt lazy :o) so installed PHP on my machine..
I last used the language when it was in the 4.0x stage, so I wasn't expecting a lot of things to be different, but I have to admit that, at least on Win32, the server module and CGI binaries *seem* to run faster than Perl CGI and the ISAPI plugin. Granted, no one on Win32 seems to care overly much about the ISAPI module (ActiveState promotes their expensive plugin instead), but running faster never hurt anyone.. :o)
Fumbled around for about half a blasted hour trying to figure out why I couldn't do a defined or a exists check on the PHP associative array, then remembered that this isn't Perl ;o). So found their isset function... honestly... *sigh*
Overall, though... if you can get used to mixing up your HTML code with your programming (I don't like JSPs, EmbPerl or Mason much either.. maybe its just me), PHP is worth a twirl for the quickie jobs.. I've heard mutterings that it won't scale for large projects (from [merlyn] of Perlmonks, among others), and I can see why this may be true, but for small jobs, its nice.. its a bit smaller than the average Perl distro, at any rate.. and very well bound with MySQL, which is useful.
Random thought: has anyone noticed that whenever you start up another language, you compare it with Perl ? I've noticed it on the Python site, on the PHP docs and in Ruby :o) wasn't looking for it, just had occasion to visit all of those sites this week, and it stuck in my head.....
