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C and Perl
I spent some time yesturday playing with Grey Matter, [1] which seems to be
one of the more popular blogging software packages out there. I downloaded
it, partly out of curiosity and partly for a project I'm working on (and yes,
I'm scoping out the competition).
Now, I can see why Grey Matter is popular: it installs very easily (I had it
running in a few minutes), is template driven (so the output can look exactly
like you want it to) and … it's in Perl.
Which means—if the web server allows CGI, you can run Grey Matter. There is
no compiling. Just stick it in, make sure the location of Perl in the scripts
is correct, and go.
I think that reason alone, is why Perl is pretty much used everywhere on the
World Wide Web.
Now, my software [2] that runs this site is in C. One, I can't stand Perl.
Never had. And thankfully, I've never had to maintain Perl code either. Two,
tower (the server that runs this site) is a 486. A 33MHz 486. By today's
standards the machine shouldn't be running, much less running a website. You
can't even give 486 based machines away, which is sad, since they work. This
site is proof. But anyway, this machine is slow, and running a blog written
in Perl would be torture indeed.
Like Grey Matter. I'm doing my testing of it on a 120MHz machine and Grey
Matter is SSS-LLL-OOO-WWW. Not quite painfully slow (painfully slow would be
running it on tower) but too slow to be used by more than a few people on my
local box here.
[1]
http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/
[2]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/03/20.2
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