Slashdot: "Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting. Here's the notes from a presentation by a Yahoo engineer at PHP Con 2002."

Finally! These guys are getting rid of their own "proprietary" language (yscript) and use an open-source language to develop their new pages like remember (they have decided not to touch the old ones yet). But the question still remains, why PHP?!

Their pros and cons for ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, Servlet, J2EE, etc... are all acceptable to me, but why not perl?

They claimed perl is not good because there's more than one way to do it, poor sandboxing and being easy to screw up server and wasn't originally designed as web scripting language. I don't agree with any of the above reasons except it "might" be easy to screw up the server if you're not sober when writing the scripts. Otherwise, perl is a great fit for their web applications since their offline processing scripts are all done in perl (they probably have a huge library already) and its performance on freeBSD is wonderful.

But wait wait, PHP is great in terms of ready-to-use scripts, huge online community, language support and it's proven to be one of the most popular scripting languages on the web. But for the most popular web site of the world, it might be a risk to switch to PHP which is not yet proven to be robust, scalable and robust under the high load. In addition to that, the more popular your scripting language is, the more people know what's going on behind the scences and it certainly increases the vulnerability.