The unfortunate part about Perl today is that people are getting lazier and less competent. If you were a programmer just 12 years ago, you probably had at least some idea of what you were doing.
But you don't need that anymore. Any script kiddie can fire up Notepad and copy-paste a tutorial from the internet and use some random PHP functions that have some vague description.

I don't understand how people manage not to drive themselves insane while using it. You don't have consistently-named functions, you do have different functions to do the same thing, you get useless error messages, and it all uses a lot of memory, as every function must be loaded.
And don't forget not being able to add a wrapper around a different library without recompiling the whole of PHP. How's that for extensibility?

PHP's popularity is mostly because of the big commercial push by Zend, which also spread FUD about Perl and it supposedly being a thing of the past.
On the plus side, however, if you need something thrown together quick, you can hire PHP users for less money than for another more practical language, I've heard.

~Thomas~ 

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."