Agree with above and also could add that PHP scripting language was built from ground up with database functionality, mostly with MySQL. Perl wasn't meant for that. With PHP it is much faster to make web pages and parse HTML, Perl usually needs to print it or create some template system. PHP language is much more secure than Perl, Perl has more holes, well it is an older language.. PHP is much easier to learn, easier than most of other languages, even though it is similar to C and Perl, but being a master on PHP it is much easier to learn Perl or C language.. On Perl, you need to know what you're doing, sometimes people who use PHP, they don't know what they are doing, but they still get the result they want. I read somewhere, that PHP is faster than Perl, meaning the server won't have so much load, especially with all the Zend stuff.
PHP has much more compiled functions than Perl, some think that it is good, some don't think so, because they need to remember much more, but in my opinion it is good. In Perl you need to write your own custom functions, you can do that in PHP too, but compiled functions work much faster. Sometimes I think that PHP development team, could add much more functions, which are really useful and usually needed.
Furthermore, PHP can be insecure by default, that is why you need the knowledge to code in a good way and you need to configure the server the right to avoid problems. There are really a lot of bad scripts out there. Sometimes I see people writing such functions, for which I want to punch them, but I can't
As I know PHP is widely used, even though a lot of cheap hosts still use PHP3 or PHP4 with bad/insecure configuration, so until most Servers won't be using PHP5 or PHP6 their progress don't really matter Today, but in the future..
As I am often using PHP, I said more PHP advantages, but I really know that some guy who has a lot of Perl knowledge could say a lot of advantages about Perl.. I think Perl in some way is much powerful, but PHP these days isn't only a language for creating websites, even though I agree that it is its main point.
To add, I read that Python is even better than Perl or PHP in some way, people who moved to PHP and later moved to Python said "Why didn't I use python before" it has a really good database interface and stuff, but I never used Python before, but looking forward to find time, even though I rather use it on applications than on creating web applications. In addition, I heard that Perl is really good for doing something, for one result and PHP for multiple stuff, Bulletin Boards and so on.
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