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I often think that the reason why PHP is still so popular compared to Perl is because php never stopped evolving.

If php had paused development or even slowed it down like this it would also have been far less popular as probably even frameworks like Symfony and Laravel won't be possible with the older versions of php.

So thank you to the maintainers but I wish Perl evolved more quickly like PHP.

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I actually prefer Perl's stability. And, anyway, it's a dynamic language: you can create stuff without requiring changes to the compiler.

For a long time I worked with Java and it became very tiresome to have to learn a new framework for every new job. Java was my main tool between versions 1.02 and 1.6.

PHP had a huge range of intrinsics specifically targeted at processing web input with web like patterns and configuration. PERL is about one thing: munging text data with minimal syntax. Granted you can do all sort of things with it, but its main strength has been as a practical extraction and reporting language.

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