Mason and Me

I've spent the better part of the last couple weeks neck deep in Perl and Mason and really trying to understand the workings of the languages.

Perl:
I think I was spoiled by PHP somewhat. It's a web language, it's made by people who want to do web things so there are functions throughout the language that do the most common things. Perl has libraries, a lot of them, and I'm sure they do everything that PHP could only dream to do, but right now I'm spending most of my time looking for how to do some things that is a simple function call in PHP. I'm sure once I know the tricks/shortcuts/secret handshakes I'll be singing Perl's praises. Regex is nice though.

Mason:
It's very interesting. As a template system it's very convenient. Oh, I just put all my design stuff in the root folder and then every subsequent sub folder will just use the content in the last folder? Swell. It's a lot to think about. I'm making a relatively small section of a site right now in Mason and I can see how it could bloat up very very quickly. My immediate goal for this site (not just the piece I'm working on) is to get a real grasp of how it's laid out and what is really important in the system.