PHP is great. For some things it's undoubtedly the right toold for the job. Perl has a much wider scope of application, because it is a programming language, plain and simple, not a web programming language. You mention that at the moment your solutions are based on shared-server type environments, in which case it is indeed very hard to make use of many of Perl's features. However, if and when you get beyond that, and start to develop solutions where you are, and need to be, in full control of the server, your Perl experience will be invaluable. Firstly, for a host of tasks NOT related to the actual generation of web pages - server management, batch processing, data cleaning, data import and export, and thousands of other things. Secondly, it will become apparent that while PHP may be great for 90% of your requirements there will be times when it will be better to write something in Perl. Suppose you want to interface to Cybercash? Suppose the site needs to automatically send a PGP signed email at some point? Maybe you want to generate images automatically somewhere? There may be PHP libraries available to do all these, I don't know, but Perl can certainly do all this with ease, and there will always be cases where Perl makes it easy.