The Common Denominator

On my back-burner at work, following a company-wide deprecation of Perl, is porting our Perl-based API services to PHP.

This may be painful, because by the time I wrote the API code, I was fluently using Perl-isms in Perl code.  It’s possible this won’t be a straightforward port because most of that is missing in PHP.

In comparison, back when I first started working here, I ported a small sub-site from Perl to PHP.  It was written in a style where I mostly needed small, mechanical changes like taking out my.  The only “big” change was creating an equivalent for HTML::Template, but that was pretty small itself.

Maybe you can write Java in any language… but then it’s 10 times easier to port to another language.