Personnaly I would (and do) use PHP. Perl is really a text processing tool (abiet a very powerful one) although it laso has all the features of a full scripting language. However PERL has several things which I don't like
- A very obsicated syntax when search strings are involved, there is nothing intuitive about reading a Perl script if it contains search strings. If you don't know what all the magic symbols and letters mean you are stuffed.
- Several ways of doing the same thing, i.e. if (condition) print or print if (condition). This means there are many more ways syntacticly of laying out a Perl script than there otherwise would be meaning that you need to remember a whole lot more if you want to be able to read any given Perl script.
Those are my 2 main objections, a lot of the features that I use from PHP I am not aware of existing in Perl (which doesn't mean that they don't) like sessions and cookies.
PHP I find clean and intuitive but you have to remember that I took up CGI programming after 10 years of C programming and PHP syntax and C syntax have a large number of similarities which made it easy to pick up for me, were as Perl often looks linke a cobbled together heap of mumbo-jumbo.