It was definitely a comparison thing. Originally I went for C, but as time went by I wanted a web technology. Though I knew PHP was gaining fame, it seemed to me that PHP was too narrow and specialized, and inherently weaker than Perl with a good templating system.

Picking up Programming Perl was the smartest thing I did at that point, because Larry Wall's way of presenting Perl impressed me strongly and convinced me to plunge into it.

Besides, to me it seemed more advantageous to use a "big" language like Perl which I could use on many other applications than a little, apparently derivative language like PHP. And obviously ASP, ColdFusion and Java were too proprietary for me to be interested. Finally the deciding factor was CPAN; and I was right.