Okay, in an attempt to avoid this little holy war, I'll throw in my
two cents... but only in regards to php and perl, which I have
experience in. php is quick (at least mod_php), php is easy, pear is
almost cool. perl is quick (particularly mod_perl), CPAN (of which
Mason is a part of) is incredibly mature and vast and wicked awesome,
but perl is a bit cumbersome to work with at times, especially when /
if you have to read someone else's code. In my experiences, mod_perl
has a slight speed advantage over mod_php, but it completely depends
on how things are configured. Neither php nor perl are strongly typed
and it's easy to let a security problem poke its head through if
you're not careful, though you can get some mileage in php with the
safe_mode and in perl with 'use strict'. at least with later
versions of php the dreaded register_globals is off by default.
Neither PHP nor Perl are particularly strong in the OO department, but
both are usable in this regard and php5 is supposed to be a big leap
forward in terms of OO (though I have yet to personally delve into
v5). In regards to php not caring about the security community, I'm
not sure if this is a valid assessment or not. It reminds me of a
discussion earlier on this list about whether or not C was still a
valid language for writing kernels and OS utilities in because of how
easy it is to shoot yourself in the foot. It all comes down to what
you want. Apparently the OpenBSD team (back on topic-ish!! yay!)
still thinks highly enough of C to use it, though they've taken the
time to learn the language well enough to avoid the common pitfalls.
It's possible to write secure (or terribly insecure) code in any
language.
