Editing Incubator escapee wiki:MediaWiki FAQ (section)

== Why are we using PHP instead of Perl? ==

It's largely a religious question, though there's no denying that Perl has many more features than PHP and it's probably faster too, when properly configured. I'm personally sad to see Perl wikipedia being replaced by PHP code: perl is wider known, more stable between versions, its development community is much larger, and I know it ;) Having said that, there's still need for better wiki to be written for wikipedia which would support namespaces together with many other features, and it's probably time to move to MySQL rather than flat-files underlying storage system, too. Magnus has volunteered his time and code and no Perl enthusiast did the same - that, I suspect, is the reason. --[[User:AV|AV]]

It seems that from all the volunteers for writing articles, none of them did volunteer to write a single line of code for the PHP wiki. So far, [[User:Clifford Adams|Clifford Adams]] was most helpful by giving me a short Perl script for the conversion, which I was able to translate into PHP. Anyway, I am sure Perl has more features, but I doubt that for an application like wikipedia, it has real advantages; on the contrary, as PHP was designed especially for WWW interfaces, it is probably more suited for this purpose. And, the PHP program doesn't read like a segmentation fault ;)  --[[user:Magnus Manske|Magnus Manske]]