Bashing Perl to Sell!
Are you tired of waiting for page rebuilding, or twiddling your thumbs waiting for slow technologies like Perl and CGI? ExpressionEngine cures all that and more by providing a 100% dynamic experience that is virtually as fast and light-weight as static pages, yet infinitely more flexible and dynamic.
OK, I hear a lot of bold Perl bashing statements, but frankly, this one is the worst ever! I know that a lot of PHP programmers don’t like Perl very much, but come on, Perl isn’t even a technology to be compared with CGI, Perl’s performance comes closer to C, and almost always out-performs PHP’s, and I’m only talking about Perl5, don’t get me started on Parrot and Perl6, heck, Parrot runs PHP better than PHP itself!
I’m not trying to start a Perl vs. PHP debate, I love both, I use each wherever applicable, I understand each one’s advantages and limitations, but I hate it when marketing hype starts using myths to sell, when some company says “Our software runs better than their software because ours is rewritten in C++, theirs is Java.”, and it’s not even close to truth!.
Let’s get one thing straight here. PHP is a very domain-specific language, sure it can be used as a general-purpose one, but it rarely is. PHP’s performance is amazing when running as a Web server module, especially when combined with caching and opcode optimization, even better, PHP5’s ZendEngine2 gives a large boost to performance; but even that doesn’t make it faster than Perl, Yahoo! said so some time ago, they know Perl’s faster, but they also know it has a tough learning curve that might slow down development.
As for ExpressionEngine, it might be a fast piece of software, but please, when you want to market it, don’t just assert without backing your arguments. I might be tired of waiting for page rebuilding, but that has nothing to do with Perl being a “slow technology”, you can take my word for it. Anybody can write good PHP code that runs two times faster than bad Perl code, and vice versa. It’s really not the language that matters, it’s how you use it.
Yeah, I see this all the time. “We can’t use Perl, it’s slow, so we need to use JSP!” Nevermind that when they say “Perl” they are meaning “forked CGI processes with poorly written Perl programs” and comparing those to Java Server Pages which are precompiled. If they’d compared mod_perl (the equivalent technology to JSP) or CGI-Perl to Java that has to be compiled on each CGI hit, they’d see that Perl is far speedier than Java. So says my clients who ask that I not name them, unfortunately.