What a lot of people don't know (or don't care to know) about PHP is that it originated as a perl script. Yes, it started off as a perl script which allowed people to embed html in code and it parsed forms for you. So this comparison of perl vs PHP is rather ridiculous since PHP was originally made off of perl.

I'd like to add that I've migrated from perl to php. And although I use both languages regularly, when it comes to the more complex things, I always come back to perl to solve problems. PHP is great cuz it's all bundled for you, but you can the exact same results with perl by installing mod_perl, and having the DBI module all set up.