Editing Portal:SaaS and Web Development (section)

=== Perl and PHP ===

Perl and PHP have a close historical relationship because they both grew in the early CGI and Apache web era. They solved overlapping problems: reading form input, connecting to databases, and generating dynamic HTML.

PHP’s own manual says that PHP began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf created a set of CGI binaries written in C, originally used to track visits to his online résumé.<ref>PHP Manual, “History of PHP,” https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref> Some secondary histories describe PHP as evolving from or being inspired by earlier personal web tools and scripts, but the official PHP history identifies the first PHP tools as C-based CGI binaries rather than Perl itself.<ref>PHP Manual, “History of PHP,” https://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

The important historical point is that PHP grew in the same ecological niche where Perl CGI was already strong. Perl was a general-purpose programming language adapted to the web. PHP was designed more directly around embedding dynamic behavior into HTML pages. That difference mattered.

Perl was more powerful as a general-purpose language. It had CPAN, strong text processing, system integration, and database access. PHP was often easier for shared-hosting users to deploy inside ordinary `.php` pages. PHP’s page-oriented model fit designers and beginning web developers who wanted to add dynamic behavior directly to HTML.

As shared hosting expanded, PHP became increasingly popular because hosts could enable it easily, users could upload `.php` files, and applications such as forums, blogs, and content-management systems could be installed with relatively little Unix knowledge. Perl remained powerful, but PHP became the more common entry-level shared-hosting web language.

This was not simply a technical defeat for Perl. It was also a deployment and usability shift. Perl CGI usually required attention to executable permissions, shebang lines, `cgi-bin` directories, file ownership, module availability, and server configuration. PHP’s model was often simpler for mass-market hosting customers.