PERL versus Visual Basic, which one is better, I am quite experienced in visual basic because my school teaches it but I would like to get a bit further in programming and I came across perl which one is the better language, more functions, easier to script, wider tutorials/help and so on so forth. Please don’t tell me that perl is cross os compatible where as vb isn’t, because that’s not what I’m looking for. :p
10 points for most comprehensive answer!
Which is better, a hammer or a screwdriver?
They’re different tools, meant for different jobs. Any competent handyman will be able to use both, and will know when to use which.
Visual basic is good at what it does (which is build GUIs in Windows) but it’s a bit of a stretch to make it do anything else. It’s possible to write games and web applications in VB, but that’s really not what the language was made for.
Perl was made to scratch a different itch. It was designed really a a utility language for UNIX system administrators, to help them with various system automation tasks. It was never intended to be attached to a visual interface, nor to be used as a web language, but these uses did evolve. Perl really took off in the early days of the Internet when it was used as a server-side programming language with the CGI interface. Perl is still used in this way, but it is slowly falling out of favor, as the language can be a bit mystical to the beginner.
The people who used to use Perl as a server-side language have generally switched to PHP, which was designed specifically for this purpose. Like Perl, PHP is free, multi-platform, and works very well with databases. PHP is a bit easier to learn and maintain than Perl, and it can be used directly from the server without needing CGI, which makes it a better-performing language than Perl. Other programmers have switched to ASP.NET (which can use VB.NET) or Java as server-side languages.
The other primary use of Perl was as a scripting language to automate various administrative tasks. For example, imagine you have 500 files that you want to convert from HTML to XHTML. (Hmmm… that happened to me this week) Perl is an ideal language for building a tool to aid in this automation.
However, Perl is drifting from favor in that role, too. Python is an easier language to learn and use than Perl, and it’s become a favored tool for this kind of job. (I wrote my XHTML conversion program in Python, because I wouldn’t have to look as much up writing in Python as I would in Perl.)
Ultimately, though, it’s not "pick one language over another." It’s very good to know several kinds of languages, because they’re all good for different kinds of jobs.
However, if you want to learn a multi-platform, multi-use language to supplement your VB skills, I think Python would be a better choice than Perl today.
I’ve got notes and examples on Python programming on my web site.