Lets not get into a religious debate here... but know that I programmed webscripts in Perl for 2 years before I found PHP, and became quite adept at the language for what I used it for. (no master, by any means... but I learned it to the point that I stopped having to look at language references more than once a week or so)

Many perl hackers haven't seen enough "mature" PHP code to form a valid opinion about it. They see the quick hacks that some of PHP's features allow... but I don't use any of those now. My PHP skill is now far superior to my Perl skill, and the PHP code that I write is cleaner, tighter, and safer than my Perl code. Also, I grew up on C. PHP almost exactly copies C syntax, which keeps me happy.

Stuff like automatically setting GET, POST, and cookie variables as global is a really bad idea, and a huge security hole. Do you let your users arbitrarily set variables in your scripts? I didn't think so. Neither do I. My PHP code wouldn't generate even a single warning if there was a strict option in PHP.