One of the nicest things about Perl - the DBI module - finallymakes an appearance in PHP. Take a look at the PEAR database abstractionlayer, by far one of the coolest PHP widgets out there.
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but a long time ago, I used to be a Perl programmer.
Not a good one, mind you. A very bad one. One who would continually get confused by the difference between hashes and arrays, and hated every second of writing a regex. One who felt like curling up and crying for Mommy every time he had to use strict().
Then I discovered PHP, and my life suddenly took a turn for the better. Gone were those agonizingly-strange symbols and convoluted syntactical constructs. PHP was clean, user-friendly and came with a manual that actually seemed to be written by humans. I felt reborn.
There was one thing I missed about Perl, though - the DBI. The DBI provided a database-independent way to write database-driven Perl code, a necessity when developing dynamic Web sites. PHP, on the other hand, had specific functions to be invoked for each database type - which made code written for one database system hard to port over to other database systems.
Then I found PHP's database abstraction layer, and I felt like I'd come home.
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