Perl Webhosting Comparison UK

Perl Web Hosting Requirements

Perl, sometimes referred to as "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language," is an interpreted programming language with a wide range of applications, libraries, and resources. Perl is often likened to a "Swiss Army knife" among programming languages. It is suitable for programming universal tasks and is commonly used on the internet for website development.

What is Perl?

Perl originated from the older Unix scripting language awk, which in turn was composed of parts of the C programming language. Perl emerged before its closest competitors Python and Ruby, which over time became more similar to Perl. For example, Ruby's syntax for regular expressions is directly derived from Perl, which in turn partly originated from the old scripting language awk. Perl was also influenced by languages such as C, Smalltalk, Lisp, Pascal, and the Unix Shell. Parts of Perl served as a model for programming languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript.

How It All Began

The first version of Perl was already available in 1987, designed in Seattle by the American programmer Larry Wall, who still oversees and advances the language's development today, in his advanced age. Initially, Larry Wall used Perl as a general-purpose scripting language for the Unix operating system. Perl served as a versatile tool for processing text files and for system and network administration.

How Does Perl Differ from Other Scripting Languages?

One of the biggest advantages of Perl over its competitors is undoubtedly the large number of ready-made modules and widespread usage. For example, CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) offers literally tens of thousands of modules that can be used for all purposes, tested under the Unix infrastructure before being deployed on other platforms. The Perl community also places great emphasis on backward compatibility, ensuring that old code runs smoothly with newer versions of the interpreter. Perl's architecture is designed to be easily configurable and extensible. This extensibility has both advantages and disadvantages. Since version 5, Perl supports the object-oriented approach, which can make the language feel somewhat cumbersome. To address this, CPAN introduced a system of extensions inspired by Smalltalk and CLOS for object-oriented programming, combining a beautiful and concise syntax. Unfortunately, Perl is often criticized for its unattractive and unreadable syntax, attributed to the use of operators like $, @, and % that date back to its Unix scripting origins. Additionally, many ready-made modules, while functional, can be difficult to modify. Since 2000, CPAN has been working to eliminate the obscure aspects of the language with each new version, aiming to modernize Perl as a scripting language. The most widely used revision of the language is version 5.22 from 2015. A completely revised version in terms of syntax and semantics is currently in development and is set to be released under the name Perl 6. The release date for this version is still uncertain.

Where is Perl used?

Overall, Perl is a powerful and dynamic language that is particularly well-suited for certain problem domains. If Ruby is too slow and Python is too convoluted, Perl might be worth a try. The Perl interpreter, written in C, can be used on all major operating systems. Traditionally, Perl is used for developing web applications and in bioinformatics. The former Unix scripting language is now increasingly used for executing database operations on small and large web servers and outputting the results in HTML pages. There are even games written entirely in Perl now. In the financial sector, where high data processing speed from various sources is crucial, Perl proves its practicality.

Perl thrives through a large community of users and developers

As with many other projects of free software, Perl also has a large community of enthusiastic users and developers, which has evolved into a proper culture. Many of these individuals have been united since 2000 in the Perl Foundation, headquartered in Michigan. These groups often meet at workshops, local conferences, and lectures to advance the language's development, as well as to have fun together. This often leads to many intellectual and sometimes humorous competitions involving the Perl programming language. The annual Obfuscation contests, where the goal is to creatively obscure the functions of the program, are legendary. Since Perl contains many elements of the English language, there are also competitions to write Perl poems.

Costs for Perl

Perl is released under the GPL (GNU Public License) and the Artistic License, and can be used for free by anyone. It is also allowed to modify the code, provided that these modifications are also freely available. Perl is an integral part of Unix, and Perl distributions for other operating systems are available at perl.org. Although Perl code can be created using a regular text editor, programmers often take advantage of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse when writing code.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Perl

Compared to other scripting languages, Perl has the following advantages:

• Free to use and distribute
• Widely available for all major platforms
• Enormous functionality
• Many freedoms in programming
• Pre-installed on many systems
• Extensive collection of modules
• Very good documentation

However, a few disadvantages should not be overlooked:

• Lack of readability in programs
• Difficult for beginners to grasp
• Can cause high server load

Web Hosting Requirements for Perl

In web hosting, Perl is executed as a server-side programming language to display dynamic content. The content is retrieved from a database and processed by Perl scripts. Perl is very powerful and is commonly used for string manipulation. There are no specific requirements for web hosting. Perl has a large library of functions.

Alternatives to Perl

Alternative languages to Perl include Python, PHP, and Ruby. All of these languages are freely available and are used for similar purposes as Perl.