Perl

[ZeroComp]

Anyone have any knowledge of the language? I've seen a couple of browser games made with it. I was wondering wether its worth learning or not.

[Jackolantern]

I prefer PHP much, much more. Perl is almost sort of a concept language. There is usually no "best way" of doing something, but rather, there are sometimes hundreds of different ways. This can make it extremely difficult to read other people's source while you are learning the language. I also found the syntax to be very ugly IMHO, considering that I am used to C-style syntax. I don't know what benefit you could get out of perl vs. PHP, which is much easier to learn and read.

[hallsofvallhalla]

yes PHP is far better. Ruby isn't bad and has much the same syntax as PHP.

[ZeroComp]

Yes, I looked at and compared PHP and Perl books in a book store and found the syntax in PHP to be far easier to understand and I hate the difficulty of adjusting to a brand new language when you've learned far more of something else. So I will not learn Perl and continue my PHP escapades once more.

[Jackolantern]

Once upon a time, Perl was king of web programming as it was the most popular language to write CGI scripts. If you coded for the web, you had to know Perl. But things have changed. Most of the Perl scripts floating around online for use in web programming are quite old, and PHP is more popular by far. In fact, PHP is pretty much considered the standard. And along with that comes more free scripts, more frameworks, more tutorials, etc.

[ZeroComp]

Yes I looked at my favorite script site gscripts.net and noticed that PHP dominated all of the site but not much else and wished to myself that there was more script varietys . I looked at a bio of a browser game creator and he used perl way back in the 90s but he said he found a huge liking for Javascript and PHP in the "New Age of Web
Development" I might start thinking about expanding my horizons and learn some VB.net or ASP.net this week

[Jackolantern]

ASP.NET is nice, but I use it with C#. However, ASP.NET is not very well-suited for web game programming because it mostly fences you off from the code. You can start intermixing your ASP.NET forms with HTML, but ASP.NET really shines for more traditional web forms programming. On the other side, PHP feels more "low-level", where you are mixing all of your PHP code with HTML, and injecting HTML directly into your PHP constructs to get the effect you need. ASP.NET, however, generates almost all of the forms HTML you would need for standard web forms. Game coding is quite different than standard web forms, though.