When I first got online in 1996, the internet was a stateless vast wasteland of information that had to be hand-coded. Ahhh then I discovered PERL. It was an archaic language that came from the land of C/C++ that was not easy to work with and most definately not fast.

It seemed like all the internet was using PERL and you would see .pl and .cgi pages all over the internet. Today PHP (and for ewww Windows users ASP) is all the rage, but there are elements of PERL (especially its string handling) that was far superior to either one of these.

As I search the internet though, PERL scripts and CGI scripts (either written in PERL or C/C++ are increasingly hard to find. Have they gone away forever like the days of writing code in COBOL and FORTRAN or am I just not looking in the right arena?

And speaking of things of yesteryear... what about JAVA... has FLASH totally taken over JAVA or is there still life for this SUN product?

Would love to hear everyone\'s feedback.

I think PHP has taken the place of Perl.  It is much more cross-platform compatible and the security & performance is configurable.  It also makes MySQL connections a breaze.  Many root-level server processes use perl, but for the web, PHP is where it\'s at.

It is human nature to make order out of chaos.  (Or at least try)

Forgive me for bumping an old topic, but I feel I need to reply to this.

Perl: It was not built for the web. It is great for system admin tasks, but doesn\'t belong on the web. It is slow and clunky when it comes to client/server over HTTP.

PHP: Fast, built for the web, but not system admin tasks. Tough to deal with for backend tasks.

Java: Java has lost its "coolness" factor in webpage applets. However, it is still picking up steam on the server and the desktop as applications rather than plugins.

Flash: Attempts to be an all-around tool. Does it reasonably well. It does great for plugins for websites or even as entire websites.

C++, et al: Absolutely not built for websites. But more for backend tasks like Perl. Of course, many programs we use today are in at least partially C++.

Perl originally was developed to help automating tasks of Unix System Administration. Since then it has made its way to be the best language to be used for System Administration tasks on the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Perl has been extensively used in other areas of back office automation in the IT industry such as Configuration Management and Software Testing (QA Automation).

It is widely known as "the duct-tape of the Internet". At the early years of the Web it was mostly about CGI Scripts. Since then, Perl has improved and now you can achieve 100-200 times faster responses using Perl for Web Development.
Source: http://www.pti.co.il/

It comes as no shock that PERL was one of the first languages to be used on the internet as most servers were indeed UNIX boxes. PERL excels at string manipulation, NOT something that is always necessary when developing web content.