Before I make any comparison, I have to point out the obvious: ASP is not necessarily an evil thing. All technologies need to be evaluated on their merits, but their merits include several different things:

1. Who will be implementing them?
2. What resources do they have available?
3. What problem are they trying to solve?
4. Who is their target audience?
5. What are the political considerations?

For item number 1, you have to remember that Perl should generally require a higher skill level on the part of the programmer. You get more power and with that power comes more danger. Don't give toddlers guns.

If the target audience is located on a company intranet, with a homogenous environment, you can take advantage of that fact and ASP may actually be a good choice.

Political considerations are tricky. If the CIO of the company says "we are sticking with Microsoft due to ease of integration of components", pointing out the rather limited vision of such an approach may not be wise.

Problems with ASP (IMHO):

• Do you want to switch to Apache for better performance, control, and security? Too bad. (It's my understanding that the Apache::ASP module is Perl only)
• Uses ActiveX for its components. Now your stuck with a Microsoft OS.
• ASP has quite a few security issues
• ASP typically relies on VBScript or JScript, two simple languages that ultimately frustrate programmer development.

Being lock into proprietary software can be fine for corporate intranets, but if you're developing something that you expose to the world, lacking the ability to really do anything about security concerns is a serious issue. There has been growing political momentum to hold vendors accountable for their security holes. If that ever happens, you can expect that vendors are going to start considering technologies that give them the choice of programming languages, operating systems, databases, etc.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of any corporate decision that locks you into an inflexible technology solution. There are reasons to do this, but Web development is typically not an area where this is true.

As for the pros of Perl, you may want to read Re (tilly) 1: Why Use Perl?.

Cheers,
Ovid

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