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Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

PHP also didn't make the mistake Perl did. A shame because Perl tried very hard to make the right thing easy with security.

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Perl's decline relative to PHP is a bit more nuanced. With mod_perl you had to be really careful with global variables otherwise another process could access them in memory. Mod_php did a better job of isolating processes so mod_perl gained a reputation as a security headache which most cheap hosting companies were not prepared to deal with. It's often overlooked that a lot of cheap hosts only offer PHP as a CGI so the benefits over Perl/CGI appear, at first glance, to be minimal but even as a CGI PHP has templating built-in where Perl, Python and Ruby don't. Perl only has CGI.pm when limited to CGI. Sure, you can try to run Perl web frameworks such a Mojolicious, Dancer and Catalyst under CGI but they're not going to compete with PHP since they don't run as drop-in templated pages. Perl did have a PHP clone - HTML::Mason - but it wasn't worth using unless you ran it with mod_perl. That's where Perl lost to PHP.

When PHP gained full OOP support with PHP5 the Perl community was still tearing itself apart over introducing a MOP and which of the dozen Moose clones should reign supreme. That was the final nail in Perl's coffin, at least in it's bid to compete with PHP.

make the right thing easy with security.

All other things being equal, security is usability[1] anti-pattern. You don't get to make clever hacks (in the original sense) on a secure system.

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. - Doug Gwyn

[1] at the very least for a power user or a developer

PHP was not really designed, though. It grew accidentally from a templating system. When other systems are said to be more secure, I think it's meant in the sense of not being horrifically broken and routinely injecting untrusted input into namespaces, markup and SQL queries.

Just like C grew accidentenly from a language created to bootstrap compilers and JavaScript was a hacky 10 day solution.

Wikipedia quotes[1] Rasmus Lerdorf as saying: "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."

Another relevant quote: "I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests."

And: "For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :) "

...which is probably true, but all the more reason to use tools that work properly rather than encouraging me to build more poorly thought-out stuff on top of a broken hack.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#cite_ref-itconversations_1...

[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

What's that mistake?

Perl 6. You think Python 3 was bad?

Ah, of course. But IIRC Perl usage on the web already started to decline (mainly in favor of PHP) before the whole Perl 6 debacle.

I think PHP's strength was also its weakness: an amalgamation of specialized functions thrown into a global namespace without having to bother with modules, CPAN or anything.

If you're an experienced dev it looks like a huge mess but if you're a complete beginner it makes it easier to work with.

Have you looked at Perl 6 recently?

The issue isn't the language which is great. The issue is with the development hell sapping resources from the community

I think it's a given that Perl6 will not achieve the prevalence that Perl5 has.

It's pretty much a given that no language will ever be able to achieve that again.

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