I'm stuck with PHP for most stuff in my current job. It sucks. I hate it. Sure its easy to learn if you enjoy looking up function names on PHP.net all the time. Function name for everything is a bad language design.

Contrast to Perl which gives you a set of tools such as embedded regexes which automatically make a plethora of PHP text processing functions obsolete (Yes you can use Perl Regexes in PHP, it however is a pain, they aren't embedded and its not quite the same)

CGI is fine for small sites without a lot of traffic. Yes PHP is faster than CGI, but if you need speed mod_perl is better anyway. Also a previous poster mentioned that mod_perl gives you access to the Apache::API. PHP does not do this, in fact doing anything with Apache using PHP is a real pain because it is intentionally separated for 'security' concerns

Which brings me to another thing. You may hear PHP developers talk all the time about how PHP is so much more secure than Perl. Simply not true. You can write insecure programs in PHP just as easily as Perl. In fact PHP I think lures newcomers into a false sense of security because of all the "security" inherent in the system, when in reality there is nothing inherently secure in PHP.

Yes I'm bitter about using PHP at work, I apologize :)