Excuse me? Where does it say that you can only use Perl or PHP to do Web based applications? Java, C, C++ and many other languages can be used as well, without any problems.

In the list of available features at my host for starters. ;o)

I've tried using C in the past, and I found it too unforgiving of errors during the learning process - it's too easy to cause the machine to reset. It's bad enough doing that on my own machine, but I'd rapidly become unpopular if I did it on someone else's server.

Having to recompile after every change didn't help the learning process much either.

The closest I've been to Java is JavaScript, so I'd have to start learning the language from scratch.

ASP and ColdFusion are too platform specific, and I have no experience with them whatsoever.

I've already had experience in adapting existing Perl and PHP programs, I have both languages installed on my own machine, and the hosts I use support both.

Perl is also a lot more suited to text processing than any of the alternatives mentioned, and HTML is basically just text.