[incanus77]

I’ll tell you why it appealed to me.

I started programming web systems in ‘96, with Perl because it was on every machine and every web host. Apache mod_perl was a thing, and it was a bad thing, because it had to be restarted all the time because of memory leaks.

On the other hand, mod_php was much more solid, and additionally, at the time, MySQL was the main thing for many websites. The Perl database bindings were wordy and obtuse, but PHP was a breath of fresh air. I was able to start using it in environments in ‘99 and honestly, I’ve never looked back at Perl as a web application language, just a systems one.

That simple difference was enough to make me fully switch over, and it set me on the path of a career programmer, so I look back on that time very fondly.

One other thing: I don’t recall Perl scripts allowing C-style pre-processing inclusion the way PHP did. I worked at Linux.com around then and we used all sorts of templating and other library reuse via this inclusion.