I learned a smattering of Perl way back when (pre 5.0), got quite good at PHP and liked it (still used Perl as a better way to write shell scripts), then two years ago started doing some serious Perl programming. Now I'm working with PHP again and am not loving it. PHP is fun and easy, and will try to do anything for you with her thousands of built-in functions, but you can't have a real conversation with her and are always a little embarrassed to be seen with her in public. Perl is the one you want to marry - smart and capable and pretty (in an unconventional way).

Main things that bug me about PHP:

1. There is no equivalent for "use strict" in PHP.
2. There is no concept of a namespace in PHP.
3. PEAR does not compare to CPAN.