Is Perl good for making social networking sites? If not what is?

Question

I am a lone programmer interested in making social networking sites. I bought a book on ruby on rails to make social networks but its plain awful and confusing and nothing works. PHP is ridiculous. Im looking at perl and my freind tells me its easy. Is it good for making social networking sites? If not what is?

Answer 1

ruby, perl and php are all ok to make social networking sites.



ruby is great, but you dislike it... so...



php is the most widely used, and it is not ridiculous at all; where are the clues that made you think so?! it's a language, good one, widely used as already said



perl is great too, but you must be warned of the fact that you can write really cryptic code in perl! there are several anecdotes about the crypticity of perl. of course it is up to the programmer to write good clean code.



these three languages alone can do not all the work anyway: you need to use a database server, so you need of course to interface with it through the language you've chosen.



perl is also great for fast (system) scripting, data extraction and even analysis (but python thanks to some great packages beats perl in this last part)...

Answer 2

First, a bit of advice: stop listening to your friends, and don't pay too much attention to some of the answers you get here.



PHP is not ridiculous. PHP is about as straightforward a scripting language you can use, and it's similarities to other languages makes it easy to learn. It is the most popular web development language in the world. It's designed for web development, and it's ability to natively integrate with databases like MySQL makes it great for building complex applications. Like social networking sites.



The guy above me said the PHP was "partially based on Perl." Well, you can ignore him, because that simply isn't true: Perl has been around as a scripting language since the early-1980s, and only became useful for web programming when the web became popular in the early- to mid-90s. PHP was developed specifically for use on the web.



The differences between the two languages are sometimes subtle and sometimes striking. They use completely different object models. Perl's use of objects was added on in version 5, and it only now being rewritten for the coming version 6. PHP's object model changed between versions 4 and 5, but has been pretty stable throughout, and is more naturally integrated into the overall language.



You can use Perl for anything, You can use PHP for almost anything. Which one you use depends on your personal preferences, but if you're looking at history as an example, PHP is used in far more popular sites. Cold Fusion is a commercial package that's expensive and simply not as widely used any more.



Learning Perl is not "easier' than learning PHP. In fact, having worked professionally with both, I would say PHP is an "easier" language to learn from a zero-knowledge point. If you think PHP is "ridiculous", you might want to consider doing something else.

Answer 3

Try C#, HTML, PHP, Perl, Java, Java Script, and VBScript. These will allow you to design your very own website of any kind. There is a lot of programing to be done, but the very basics are easy. You create a front page, then a user database, then a log in protocol, then a user default page, and a way for the user to upload pictures, and to add their friends, and search for their friends (I'd suggest integrating Google search, it's free), and so on. In other words, go to about 2-4 years of college, in the Computer Sciences degrees program. Specialize in web design. Oh, you'll also need a server farm. Each rack will cost around 10,000 US dollars, so get cracking. You will also need a dedicated high speed T3 or better line. You'll probably want to outsource that stuff, it can be very expensive to buy your own building. Just the cooling costs run to the several thousand per day. Seriously, you can't just point and click this stuff.

Answer 4

Myspace runs on ColdFusion, Facebook is PHP. There's not really a number one language for coding a social networking site.



PHP is partially based on perl, so if you didn't like PHP, you may have some trouble with perl as well.

Answer 5

You might want to start by learning programming (it sounds as if you took the "learn a language first" route). Anyone who knows programming can pick up the fundamentals of Ruby in a day or so (and the fundamentals of PHP in an hour). If you don't know programming, you have to learn each language from 0 - if you do, you learn a different syntax, but programming is programming. If you need a linked list you don't have to learn what it is all over again, you just have to decide whether single or double linking is better for the current need..

Answer 6

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Answer 7

This has been answered many times before

Answer 8

I also want to ask the same question