Page 2 - Perl and Flatfile vs PHP and Mysql...

Originally Posted by icrf

If you don't know Perl but do know PHP (there isn't much syntactic difference), then by all means, use PHP. If you don't know either but the site is already written in one, keep it there. I fully admit to being bias in favor of Perl, but it does get a bad name. You can write wonderfully maintainable code in one of the various frameworks, or write horribly obfuscated code that you'll swear you didn't write six months from now. Perl is incredibly flexible and expressive, one of the language's many mantras is "give the developer enough rope to hang themself"

Speed is a common misconception, Perl/CGI is no slower than PHP/CGI, and modperl is no slower than modphp (apache assumed). The problem stems from the fact that php is rarely run outside of modphp, but a healthy number of perl hosts still run it through CGI (any host worth snot wouldn't). The end difference is largely transparent, outside from the speed, and like most performance "concerns" you really have to have a high load for it to make any difference.

Originally Posted by icrf

If you know PHP, then most of Perl shouldn't be hard to pick up. But, like I said, it's easy for perl code to become unintelligible. Web applications are notoriously bad about that. I'm a big fan of CGI::Application which uses HTML::Template. There's even a PHP port of the framework, using smarty for templates. I think Amazon uses Mason.

If nothing of the sort was used and there's just a bunch of print() statements in the code to output HTML, well...good luck with that. There's a reasonable Perl forum on the DevShed sister network that could help, though I'd imagine with 3600 posts here, you're a pretty resourceful individual.