Beware: you'll someday find yourself having two code bases, one in PHP and one in Perl, and unable to blend both into a single program — working with two languages often leads to writing the same code twice. This is specially the case with PHP since making it bind to any other language is hell (I speak from experience). I'm not saying use one language or the other, but the sooner you choose one the better. (Guess which one I'd choose ;)