One nice thing about PHP in relation to Perl is that it offers novice programmers an easy bridge from writing web pages in HTML, to writing web pages that draw from a database, to creating actual web applications. I taught a web programming class this summer with PHP as the language of choice and really appreciated the gentler learning curve. Given good coding conventions, you can create readable, modular, extensible projects in PHP.

The real bonus ( for me as a teacher ) is that the Perlish syntax made it possible to boost some of the more advanced students into using Perl. Regular expressions, for example, are identical and provide a nice bridge.