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Comment by josephscott | Hacker News Reader

My first code for CGI was all done in C. When I found Perl, there was no looking back, never used C for CGI again.

While I haven't written any significant Perl in a long time, I will always appreciate how much it improved things for me back then.

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C-based CGI programs that implemented a web app for doing drop shipment of phones to customers. It was supposed to be used for just a few months while they waited to roll out a more official solution. The users hated the official one, and kept using my version for another 4 years.

After that, it was Java all the way.

Same. Wrote a complete database-driven web application in C, an online bookstore. Switching to Perl 4 was a vast improvement in terms of development productivity.

Same. My first C cgi program was a small Tic Tac Toe game that kept the current state in the request string. It had a little logic to play against the user. It did not, however, support number of players 0.

Mine played Othello using the same mechanism. It was cool because every square that was a valid move would change the cursor when hovered over. The CGI would make the players move, plan the computers counter move, return the board showing the players move with an automatic reload after X seconds to the URL encoding the game state plus the pre-planned machine move. Used a html table ang gifs. So fun.

Almost same here, I went with Tcl instead.

Just thinking about C's story for strings, and trying to use that for webpage rendering/input handling/validation... [shudder]

Same here. cgic was a useful library for C, but Perl was a revelation.

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