From AdminWiki

The choice

Although PHP might be your first choice when doing "web development" that doesn't mean it's the best one.

Food for thought:

• PHP in contrast to perl
• PHPSucks
• Experiences of using PHP in large websites

Unbiased facts:

• PHPs availability is much better on "foreign" servers.
• PHP is much easier to use than Perl for beginners, because you can just throw HTML in PHP files (or vice versa).
• Perl is much cleaner than PHP.
• Perls webserver integration sucks. Neither CGI, nor mod_perl nor fastcgi give you the ease of use of PHP.

PHP

• Securing
• Tuning (Zend Optimizer & replacements)
• Smarty
• PEAR

Perl

• FastCGI vs. mod_perl
• Package Management (dh-make-perl, etc)