PERL is back from the dead

Yeah, PERL!
If you're "old enough" you might have heard about it...

Now, seriously, I got to work for a site, both SEO and programming that runs on full blown PERL( isn't that amazing ).

And not something like a garage ghetto web store, but a site that's news feeding about dozen of major language newspapers with well known opinion makers and way bellow the 100 000 mark on alexa ( where the less is the better, you know ).

Enough bragging, the point is programming. PERL is an excellent language, extremely flexible, and of course, easy to read and understand

I'm kind of excited now jumping into this particular project. Now what is that $%^@#^%$#@^%$&#@$@(&@($ line saying here ?

Ditto, I'm probably not old enough to have heard it when it was in 'fashion' however I have heard of it (before now ) so yeah whats the difference between Pearl and lets say PHP?

Thanks

Josh

Ah, yes... PERL officially stands for "practical extraction and report language" ( unofficially might be "pathogenic eradication of real life" or similar ) and this abbreviation is back from the times it was designed and used mainly for UNIX system administration tasks - such as bulk file processing ( namely: "extract and report" from logs for example ) and many similar. It has really good regular expression mechanism and robust module support.
Apart from syntactical differences, in regards with PHP, the main reason its popularity was beaten is the fact that is much harder to use, learn and understand. Moreover, PHP usually beats it by speed - you need specific "system setup" to make PERL perform faster and this was not the common environment at the times it was widely used. Both languages use interpreters, not compilators, but PERL being more complex and harder to parse/process gets a bit more processor time and resources, in general. Again, this had been overcome by using so called "mod_perl" with Apache web servers.
On the other hand, being extremely modular and flexible language ( you can write a statement that performs one and the same operation in at least more than one way and that counts for even simple things like if ), supporting any database, very well fit with UNIX systems for it was born and lived trough their development side by side, PERL has got still powers to show.

AND IT'S BEEEEEEEEEEP HARD