Let's take these one at a time.

Perl is not a scripting language. It's a programming language. Yes, with the right modules, you probably could code Quake in it. You'd be mad to try, but you probably could. People have written compilers with it.

Perl is not called PERL (it's not an acronym, and don't try and argue that it means Practical Extraction and Reporting Langauge, it doesn't, Larry Wall came up with that after the language was named).

Perl is much better than PHP. PHP is much slower, collapses under less pressure, and if you want a good example - visit Slashdot. Runs Perl (and they wouldn't switch to PHP even if they were starting from scratch). NASA use it. Amazon use it. The US military use it.

Perl is easy to learn. It's more flexible than PHP (you'll always find some nutter who wanted to do the same thing as you and has written a module :)).

Python, Ruby et al - no comment. Don't know them. I hear good things about both.

In tests, Perl is one of the fastest programming langauges out there (I can't remember the URL of the page, but some guy wrote the same program in about 50 different languages and Perl was really high up while PHP was really low down). With mod_perl, depending on the application, you can get pretty close to C speeds with it (although C will always be fastest).

Further information - http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/01/10PerlMyths.html.

- Bagpuss
http://www.chatbear.com/
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