Is Perl good for making social networking sites? If not what is?

[Branzers]

I am a lone programmer interested in making social networking sites. I bought a book on ruby on rails to make social networks but its plain awful and confusing and nothing works. PHP is ridiculous. Im looking at perl and my freind tells me its easy. Is it good for making social networking sites? If not what is?

[joe.attaboy]

First, a bit of advice: stop listening to your friends, and don't pay too much attention to some of the answers you get here.

PHP is not ridiculous. PHP is about as straightforward a scripting language you can use, and it's similarities to other languages makes it easy to learn. It is the most popular web development language in the world. It's designed for web development, and it's ability to natively integrate with databases like MySQL makes it great for building complex applications. Like social networking sites.

The guy above me said the PHP was "partially based on Perl." Well, you can ignore him, because that simply isn't true: Perl has been around as a scripting language since the early-1980s, and only became useful for web programming when the web became popular in the early- to mid-90s. PHP was developed specifically for use on the web.

The differences between the two languages are sometimes subtle and sometimes striking. They use completely different object models. Perl's use of objects was added on in version 5, and it only now being rewritten for the coming version 6. PHP's object model changed between versions 4 and 5, but has been pretty stable throughout, and is more naturally integrated into the overall language.

You can use Perl for anything, You can use PHP for almost anything. Which one you use depends on your personal preferences, but if you're looking at history as an example, PHP is used in far more popular sites. Cold Fusion is a commercial package that's expensive and simply not as widely used any more.

Learning Perl is not "easier' than learning PHP. In fact, having worked professionally with both, I would say PHP is an "easier" language to learn from a zero-knowledge point. If you think PHP is "ridiculous", you might want to consider doing something else.