New students do not pick and choose from a variety of languages. My point is that Perl isn't giving itself a chance of competing for mindshare in web development college courses because of the compatibility and usability headaches. I rarely see ANY Perl courses for web developers these days, let alone mod_perl, while PHP courses are ten-a-penny. The Perl community can ignore it if they wish but I can't.

Coming to your individual points:

• The use of WinXP was for testing only as I envisaged teaching the course in such a way that students could easily set up and practice on their home machines, which are often Windows machines. PHP works nicely with Windows, so why can't mod_perl? Someone in the Perl community needs to take the student mindshare seriously.
• I cannot recommend that new students re-compile anything. I need something which works with a simple config file as PHP does. Why is this so difficult with mod_perl+Mason? I can recompile Apache but students come to learn programming not system administration
• I loaded Apache 1.3 and the corresponding mod_perl but couldn't get a libpreq for Windows. Why isn't this libpreq bundled with mod_perl, or Mason for that matter. It's a complete joke hunting all over the internet for different bits 'n pieces like this. PHP will win every time.
• If you don't use things like Mason or Apache::Template how do you separate your presentation and business logic? How do you implement templating? Seriously, I'm interested in alternatives.

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